There was never anything wrong with the table layout algorithm, what sucked was that there wasn't any way to apply it without typing your HTML rigidly to that s

There was never anything wrong with the table layout algorithm, what sucked was that there wasn't any way to apply it without typing your HTML rigidly to that structure. The situation still isn't perfect and flexbox is a strange alternative that I'm not quite happy with yet, but you can't deny that the HTML in my example represents the content you described with almost no extra layout fluff.