The Web is Ruined and I Ruined It (1997), in which early-era web guru David Siegel repents of such non-semantic design tactics as <table> hacks and spacer gifs — presentational hacks interspersed with web content; a web purist’s sin as unto the wearing of mixed garments. He does not mention Creating Killer Web Sites by name, but I think that, at least in part, is what he refers to.

Link found via Dave Shea’s (of mezzo fame) In Defense of Fahrner Image Replacement, that not-so-arcane method of displaying images by setting them as the background of a sized CSS block element.

(Yes, it’s all old stuff. I wasn’t doing web design in 1997 yet, so the whole issue wasn’t even on my radar at the time. I didn’t even have radar.)