Six nesting levels for tables? Cool, what were you making?

Hacker News used nesting tables for comments as late as 2016 (possibly even later). In fact, techinically this site still does use tables for comments, although in a less hacky way than it did a decade ago, which is why browsing it on a mobile device doesn't result in really tiny text at odd intervals.

So you could easily have ten or more nested levels of tables on a comment thread.

Upromise. com -- a service for helping families save $ for college. Those layouts, which I painstakingly hand-crafted in HTML, caused the CTO to say "I didn't know you could do that with HTML", and was served to the company's first 10M customers.

I remember seeing a co-worker stuck on trying to debug Netscape showing a blank page. When I looked at it, it wasn’t showing a blank page per se, it was just taking over a minute to render tables nested twelve deep. I deleted exactly half of them with no change to the layout or functionality, and it immediately started rendering in under a second.