To understand tables, we really need to travel back to the inception of HTML itself. While working on a web technology that allowed you to put things on a screen wherever you wanted, the Harvard Technology MegaLab (or HTML for short) decided to have some fun with their investors. They presented a complete joke of a language where many things - like centering something on the screen for example - were ridiculously convoluted.
The centrepiece of the joke was an element that allowed you to give it a width, but then totally ignored it. That somehow found a way to make the simplest bug impossible to find. They even figured out a way to render the undo command inneffective. The element was the table. The joke was using it for layouts.
However investors, being the fat headed trufflehogs that they were, decided this language was the one for them. Cutting the presentation short they screamed "Ship it! Ship it!" and refused to listen to the protestations of the boffins. Megalab's joke backfired and the real HTML, the one that made sense, never saw the light of day.
We'll never be able to reverse the fundamental innaproprateness of HTML for creating websites, but roads to recovery have been made. Now tables are mainly used as a sort of hazing technique to test the mettle of interns. So, a joke gone wrong has shaped the entire history of the humanity. At least developers of the world can still enjoy the finest punchline of the MegaLab's elaborate prank; tables are the only html element that can inherently vertically center their content.
Find out more about a future where you can put-things-where-you-like with this learn flexbox game.
