I came upon PunBB almost three years ago, at Version 1.1.5, in June of 2004. I was already familiar with handling my front end content with a CMS, so I wanted to try my hand at a forum.
What PunBB had going for it, and still does, is that it's a very capable forum. Throw at it what you want, it renders your copied text exact and keeps track of who, what, where and when. It was also kind to my server, my first live PunBB install is still running on a Pentium Pro 200mhz. Styling, it never crossed my mind back then, it was about the digitized word.
Today, we'd like to take Pun to a different level, so styling is in vogue. If you've ever styled a front end, either using a freely available template or your own design, you know how hard it is to get the page to adjust to different browsers and font sizes. So moving forward on PunStyle, we have to take into account how well the current XHTML attributes of Oxygen can adjust to anything you throw at it and what container size it may reside in.
Too often, we pay attention to the looks and miss the brains.