for layout , i still think tables did it right, because web is primarily a grid like newspapers. wish we had a <grid> type of element with responsive rows and cols, if only to help with vertical alignment and those missing </div>s
Html tables are not all comparable to newspaper columns. Newspaper-style columns (where text flows from the from bottom of one column to the top of the next column) can be achieved with the "columns" property in CSS.
But newspaper-style columns are not as useful on the web, since it is really annoying if the columns are longer then the screen and you have to scroll up and down. In that respect the web is very different than newspaper layouts where the dimensions are fixed.
As for <grid>, layout should be specified in CSS rather than through the html element, which is why we have "display: table", "display: grid" etc. in CSS, which should do what you want.
Agreed. But tables in the HTML was a mess to maintain, and does not readily translate to a phone screen (which is well over half of Internet usage these days). What I did, in the early 2010s, was use “display: table” CSS for the elements in up to date browsers, then use some ugly “<!--[if lt IE 8]><TABLE><![endif]-->” for Internet Explorer 6 and 7.
