&gt;You make it sound like table display was added after the failure of other layout methods. Not so - table display was there right from the beginning when CSS first added layout (CSS2 in 1998).<p>Yes I mis-formuled it.<p>&gt;It was IEs failure to implement it for nearly a decade that meant nobody was aware of or could use it for many years.<p>No it wasn&#x27;t only IE, display table was also broken in Firefox and Opera. There were plenty of layout that you couldn&#x27;t obtain in CSS but worked well with HTML tables.