What Are HTML Tables?
HTML tables were originally intended to allow web page authors to display tabular data — the kind you might find in a spreadsheet or a scientific paper. Over time, as websites became more graphically interesting, web designers began using HTML tables to arrange visual elements on their pages, since they had no other tools at the time to style such content. (CSS came later.) Now, in the modern online landscape, more and more sites are moving toward CSS-based layout that separates form from content (doing away with “presentational markup” in favor of bare-bones HTML documents whose elaborate styles are specified solely by style sheets). For HTML email messages, however, tables can and should still be used to create multi-column layouts, borders, simple blocks of color, and even complex “jigsaw puzzles” of adjacent images that connect to form one large picture. In fact, many of the HTML emails you receive today that use elaborate graphical layouts were created using tables.
