Table designs were kinda brilliant though, both in how easy they were to create[1], but also how easy they were to parse programatically or with a text-based browser. Given context of the table in front of you, you can generally piece together where on the screen the information goes without rendering anything.
You can generally do a lot of the same things with CSS grid layouts, but it's 100x more complicated, and the layout information is generally in the CSS file rather than the document itself making parsing the layout a Hard problem demanding the implementation of a partial CSS engine (and a sometimes JS engine too).
[1] A totally viable workflow was to draw your website in something like photoshop, cut boxes where the content would go, and then export it to an HTML table.
Re: photoshop html table export
Marketing email is still produced in this exact same way at some companies - ask me how I know!
(If anyone isn’t familiar with this, it’s because for security reasons we’ve all decided email should use an intentionally gimped de facto (non-)standard which only supports a few little dabs of CSS - 90% of email is formatted with strictly 90s technology.
And by “we” I mean that’s what Google and MS allow in their clients, so it’s very pointless to try to go beyond that given their combined usage share.
also how easy they were to parse programatically or with a text-based browser.
Or even a regular expression.
But what if Tony the Pony comes?