Hi,
Yes I did notice the timespan. This particular forum moves a bit slow and I spend much of my time on Ask Me Helpdesk answering questions about lawn mowers on a busier forum. I answer questions on Qpost , also and CSS, and all that site can be a bit slow. If I happen to answer a query promptly, it is because my periodic visit coincided with the post.
I believe you are asking about what is termed as "pixel-oerfect" construction. Generally done with a mixture of JavaScript and CSS in the foreground and PHP, Cold Fusion, etc. in the background. The PHP can be hidden from view by the use of CMFs/CMSs as Drupal, Django, Zope, Zoop, etc. I happen to mention those as I experimant with them as well as LAMPP and XAMPP.
I have written HTML since 1995 and posted my first site the first week of July, 1996. I started "playing" with CSS in 1997 and one old site I made still exists. It will render in IE4 NN2.2, Opera3.5. None of my current maintained sites will.
As a general rule the consensus seems to be that some values should be avoided if at all possible. Fixed generally used with background-attachment. The "!important" declaration is considered a kludge for overriding bad stylesheet construction which is mostly a poor use of the rules of specificity.
Most of my personal sites are on freely available hosts and allow very limited CGI and no server-side access for databases and preprocessors, so they are necessarily static.
A good site to look at is the internet.com/Earthweb/DevX site. It has some dropdown menus that do go off screen on some monitors, but it is one of the per-eminent web technology site run by Jupiter Media;
internet.com - the Internet and IT Network from WebMediaBrands Inc.
Peace,
Clarke