An anniversary reminder from Anil Dash: it has been four years since Zeldman said “To Hell With Bad Browsers.” It was around then that we got to know the @import hack, started to shun Netscape 4 with div.ahem { display: none } “browser upgrade initiative” messages, and slowly began turning the <tables>* on bad web markup practices.

And today, four years later, we’re thinking of IE5.x the way we thought of Netscape 4 back then; sites like ABCNews and Orbitz and McAfee and of all things, MSN, sport XHTML pages with CSS layouts; and Mozilla not only came into being, but reached and passed v1.0, was downloaded millions of times, and is even beginning to threaten IE’s browser supremacy. Who’d have thunk it?

The face of the web was changed in four years, thanks to Jeffrey, ALA, and the WaSP. It’s like a graduation with flying colors.

Here’s how the Web Archive remembers it, albeit without CSS.

* WHAT A CLEVER PUN THAT WAS. WASN’T IT CLEVER?