This exactly. CSS proponents were badmouthing tables left and right, but tables excelled at the kind of layouts that CSS struggled with. Reactive three column

This exactly. CSS proponents were badmouthing tables left and right, but tables excelled at the kind of layouts that CSS struggled with. Reactive three column website with tables? Super easy. Reactive three column layout with CSS? Requires a human sacrifice and won't work in half of the browsers of the time. Want the text centered in the column headings? In tables it was a built in feature. With CSS, well, I hope you like pain. These weren't obscure problems either. Many websites were already in a 3 column layout because it was so natural with tables, so converting them over to CSS was an immediate pain point. That said, if you wanted to do something more complicated then tables could fall apart pretty quickly whereas CSS had a solution. Adding columns to a table when someone expanded their window and reflowing the content into the new columns was basically not possible with tables, but is something CSS can handle for example. Most people only had simple problems though and CSS complicated their life considerably.