Sure, table layout is how you'd have to do this. To me this shows that half of HTML/CSS happened because of legacy issues and not with deliberate thought. The semantic web is mostly dead other than to help Google parse out their own ads while CSS remains a mess full of hacks like this.

There was never anything wrong with the table layout algorithm, what sucked was that there wasn't any way to apply it without typing your HTML rigidly to that structure. The situation still isn't perfect and flexbox is a strange alternative that I'm not quite happy with yet, but you can't deny that the HTML in my example represents the content you described with almost no extra layout fluff.

Fair enough. Perhaps this wasn't the best example.