Do you have an example of such a website? I'm genuinely curious if such a thing exists. I've been doing some CSS+HTML tutorials lately, and the ones I've been reading, I don't see how you would without style attributes in all of your tags, which is essentially just using CSS.

This very site is usable for reading and writing without CSS or JavaScript. Oddly, you can vote without JavaScript but not without CSS (buttons aren't visible in layout), which could easily be corrected.

Its appearance doesn't change as much as it might because it uses nested tables for layout (a Nineties-era practice) and deprecated properties like bgcolor but even without those choices it could still be usable.

'Early' websites [0] were very linear, text-heavy affairs. They still had images, of course, just a pretty basic 'full width, top to bottom' layout. Authors quickly realised you could abuse tables for layout, but rudimentary alternatives used frames. They just relied on default styles. Next time you're working on a site, just drop the stylesheet. That. That's what sites looked like.

[0] I'm talking mid-late nineties here. I don't know, off the top of my head, what level of CSS support or style-in-html support there was, I'm just talking about very hazy memories of what they looked like.

My personal website, which is admittedly quite simple, is (IMHO) totally readable and usable without CSS enabled.

As I was building it, I'd constantly check it with CSS off in order to make sure it had a reasonable flow for folks using screen readers.

www.ft.io if you're interested.

Have any examples? Just using tables to lay stuff out?

No, definitely not. Tables are for data, not for laying stuff out.

For a fun surprise, view the HTML source of this page!

HTML embedded into email templates often uses tables for layout.

If you get a commercial email and the content has graphic borders around the content, check the source and you'll probably see a table. Also emails with text content in columns.