phpBB 2005 inspired CSS bb05

Plain Tags, Durable Pages

This page is a small love letter to early internet forums: the local boards, tiny communities, sticky posts, searchable answers, and signatures that made a page feel inhabited. Link bb05.css, write ordinary markup, and let the tables do the layout work.

The default voice is Verdana at eleven pixels, with Trebuchet MS for the board title and Courier New for code, signatures, and copied terminal fragments.

The best old forum pages were not pretty because they were polished. They were pretty because every cell had a job.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="bb05.css">

<table width="100%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
  <tr>
    <td><h1>Board Title</h1></td>
    <td align="right">Login | Register</td>
  </tr>
</table>

Heading Rhythm

Use h1 for the board name, h2 for sections, and h3 for local post titles. Paragraphs stay compact because forum pages were made for scanning, quoting, and returning later from a search result.

Fourth Level Heading

Small headings work for post notes, changelog entries, and field labels that need more weight than bold text.

• Links become blue in posts and dark in navigation.
• Bold text reads like a forum status label.
• Code blocks keep their hard-edged copy-paste feel.

Re: Table Layouts

Tables make the hierarchy explicit: board, category, topic, author, message, date. The page can be dense without being mysterious.

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