Kids these days have their flexboxes and their ems and their position absolutes. In the olden days of HTML, we arranged everything with table tags and we liked it. Well, some of us did. Mike was recently doing part of a redesign, and when the background color of the page was changed, a bunch of garbage text appeared in various input forms. How could changing the CSS background color cause garbage text to appear?

<b>Billing Address Information</b>
<p class="style3">Billing Address 1:<font color=white>0ooo0.....</font><input type="text" name="BillStreet1"></p>
<p class="style3">Billing Address 2:<font color=white>o00000...</font><input type="text" name="BillStreet2"></p>
<p class="style3">Billing City:<font color=white>00o00..0.o...0..</font><input type="text" name="BillCity"></p>

It certainly gives new meaning to the term “whitespace”. The mix of characters implies that either the person responsible deeply understood how proportional fonts work in terms of sizing, or they absolutely didn’t. They almost certainly didn’t. Then again, this kept all the fields aligned on all the browsers anyone had tested with, so maybe they did?