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Source. The grid is microsoft.com, Wayback capture 12 December 1998, pulled with the unrewritten-bytes form. That capture was re-fetched on 20 August 2026 and diffed against the copy in reference/4-construction/table-layout/: identical, 19,088 bytes. Every number on the plate was measured out of that file rather than remembered. Sixty 1ptrans.gif instances, sixteen distinct declared sizes, and ten struts in the spacer row summing to 618 inside a <TABLE> that declares WIDTH=602. The cell numbering, including the slip where <!--4--> labels a 9 pixel cell and then two 10 pixel ones, is the author's own and is quoted unedited. The cell padding and cell spacing defaults are from home.netscape.com/assist/net_sites/tables.html, capture 15 April 1997, in Netscape's own words: cell spacing of two, cell padding of one, and gives the most compact table possible under the three zeroed attributes. The Apple contrast is apple.com, same day, four spacers in the whole document with a 61 byte file.

The 44 bytes were measured twice, and the spacer on this page is not Microsoft's. Their 1ptrans.gif was re-fetched from the archive on 20 August 2026; the request resolved to a different snapshot, 18 February 1999, and returned the same 44 bytes, so the file is stable across captures rather than an artifact of one fetch. Of those 44, forty three are a valid GIF89a and the forty fourth is a stray null sitting after the trailer, and byte 37 sets the interlace flag on a one pixel image. Whether that trailing byte came from Microsoft or from the archive is not knowable from here, so the plate says it is in the archived bytes and stops there. The spacer this page actually uses was built byte by byte for this guide: 43 bytes, same magenta and black color table, same transparency flag, decoded and confirmed to be one fully transparent pixel. It is inlined as a data URI, which is the one thing about it that is not period honest, because in 1998 it cost an HTTP request and then a cache hit.

The page is a recreation and the missing images say so on their faces. The markup is real: real nested tables, real spacer images with real WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes, nothing simulated in CSS and no archived file loaded at runtime. The nav labels and the six headlines are the 1998 originals, rendered as text rather than links because every one of those URLs is gone. Microsoft's artwork is held as reference only and is not shipped: mscom_autopc.jpg and contest.gif appear as outlined boxes at their declared 117 by 85 and 114 by 66, which is also the argument, since the layout held before the image arrived. The blue bullet is drawn at its measured 7 by 10 and is this guide's own, not the original file.

Deliberately absent. What Netscape 4 did in 1998 with 618 pixels of columns inside a table declaring 602. The plate reports only what your browser does, which is to size the table off the columns and ignore the tag, and it counts that live rather than asserting history. Also absent: any claim about how widely the technique was used, when it ended, or what replaced it, and any figure for how many pages carried a spacer GIF. CNN's front page is 50 open <table> tags in one document, counted in the captured file, but it is stated as a number and not rendered: fifty tables is a good statistic and a bad specimen.

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