Tables are meant for displaying tabular data, they are not meant to be an invisible frame or grid for page layouts but this is what they were often used for. T

Tables are meant for displaying tabular data, they are not meant to be an invisible frame or grid for page layouts but this is what they were often used for. Tables fell out of favour because many people used nested table structures which were messy and inaccessible to people with screen readers. (Note that non-nested tables are not inaccesible to screen readers.) I actually think a table-inspired layout approach for CSS would have been simpler to understand and to implement than the clumsy, messy CSS methods we currently have. Even Flexbox has an over-engineered (or over-complex) feel for some of its rules. Oh well, the benefit of hindsight...