I am referring to the image slicing technique and rendering fancy buttons and sidebar "blocks" using tables in the likes of PHP-Nuke and other content management systems of the time.
> I remember in the early days cobbling together elements with top-left, top-right, etc image slices. Want't really too long ago.. maybe 10 years?
To me this is core ajax and php era, so ~2002-2006 which would be about 18 years ago.
By the time CSS standards for rounding corners arrived a lot of pain has been inflicted on us developers, but by now it feels as if this era never existed (same with pre/post flex to take another CSS milestone)