This was indeed problematic as was the ridiculous need to restate font presentation in every table cell. Also, a trailing </td> could break a page in a snap! I taught this stuff in 1998-2000ish. Remember Siege's "Creating Killer Web Sites?" He later stated he broke the Web :)
Joseph Labrecque @JosephLabrecque
22 Feb 2021
Replying to @mholzschlag @leslielabrecque
Don't forget the infinitely resizable transparent .gif files that propped all those tables open 👍🏻

Feb 22, 2021 · 1:25 PM UTC

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Siegel did not invent table layouts and spacer gifs, but he sure did popularize them. One of his early theories was that the Web and PDF would be very inter-related. He was not so very far off.
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