I'm afraid I have no tip to offer, but I can empathise because we've run into the same problem and we too are still looking for a good solution. I think tables

I'm afraid I have no tip to offer, but I can empathise because we've run into the same problem and we too are still looking for a good solution. I think tables just don't sit well in HTML. We are trying to force a 2D structure where useful operations might be based on either dimension into a flattened hierarchical structure where one dimension must take priority, and that is awkward. The attempt to work around this by introducing colgroup and col elements never really went anywhere either. So for now, we resort to tricks like artificial DOM structures and pretend margins/padding and manual positioning, the same kind of hackery that we used to use for page layouts until tools like flexbox and grid were introduced. What we really need, IMHO, is a similarly comprehensive set of dedicated table selectors and styling options in CSS. There have been proposals like the nth-col pseudo-class and the || column combinator, which look like useful ideas, but again these haven't really gone anywhere so far. There might be some value in allowing tables to be styled as row-major or column-major (a similar idea to flex-direction) and then basing other styling around the major and minor axes rather than relying on rows/children and columns specifically.