Oh yeah, IE 6 did not support display:table. This was the age of hacks. Microsoft basically managed to block any progress on web standards for half a decade.

I’m not sure why you’d blame this on W3C though. IE stasis froze any standard including ECMAScript. It was Microsofts attempt to halt the progress of the web because they considered it a threat to their desktop dominance. Luckily it didn’t work.