I was not really interested if those doing a "View Source" are going to be offended by my "incorrect" use of tables.
See here, where it includes a demo: https://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=161099
Non-table layouts also came into fashion when screen resolutions started to vary more, and some degree of fluidity and responsiveness could've been implemented with non-table layouts while IE was still a target. However, IE was lacking so badly even with IE8 that a lot of CSS that had been a W3C recommendation for years at that point just either didn't work, it was quirky because IE handled the box model a little differently. Ít was one of the reasons why Javascript shims and IE-specific CSS had to help out fairly often.
IIRC Netscape didn't either around the IE4/5 days. It also had significant performance problems with large sets of nested tables which IE6 (and perhaps IE5) did not.
For example back at University on 133MHz Pentium-class CPUs a large slashdot page with all threads open could take minutes to render where IE took merely a noticeable number of seconds - a co-student use to make a big thing of this as a reason to dump other browsers and use IE. There was actually a use case for this away from the University's fixed line connection: on dial up you could, RAM+swap and browser-not-crashing permitting, open a couple of windows like that then disconnect the modem and read at your leisure without racking up a per-minute phone bill.
Or maybe NS was capable of progressive display and this was just hidden in extreme cases by the performance issue, that was a time ago and memory is hazy…
I think it was around the time of Firefox 1.6 when it felt like it was about on par with IE 6 in rendering speed for me, after tweaking some of its settings. I think it was also rendering tables progressively at the time.
You both agree and disagree with my comment :)
If memory serves me right, I started migrating off table layouts at the time when IE6 was still by far the most popular browser (>80% of the market?).
It was probably a case of killing several birds with one stone - make layouts fluid while avoiding IE's issues with rendering tables.
I don't recall if that was vanilla HTML or vendor extension, I suspect not vanilla.
I stopped doing front end work about the time tables for layout went out of fashion, my dorky internal tools still use them.
From a practical point of view too, if you wanted to make separate mobile and desktop views just by using different stylesheets, using a table made it very difficult.
(That said, in 2000, if you were using separate mobile and screen stylesheets, you were in an extreme minority because there were relatively few full HTML web browsers on mobile devices. Instead, most phones, if they could access the Internet, accessed a different version of the Internet accessed over WAP.)
It never works like I want it to, and I never know if it's because I'm dumb or the tool is poorly-designed, and by then I've wasted two hours, so I always end up just going back to tables because they freaking work.
The good news is now flexbox and grid work in all modern browsers, so this is (finally) a solved problem
The only issue with floats was that there were a lot of edge cases that happened in only certain browsers, so you had to be careful. Lots of browser bugs.
Job security.