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.<p>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.)<p>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...