Why use tables to structure your layout?

Question

Looking at the source code for Stack Overflow, I noticed they have used tables and inline CSS quite a bit, also something I found odd was use of inline table attribute forma

Answer 1

I'm a reasonably smart person, not too far below average at least, but I find css layout totally unintuitive. Tables are extremely intuitive. I think one measure of a good technology is how often you have to refer to the manual while reading it. Tables blow CSS out of the water in this way compared to css. Again and again, when using css, I have to dig to figure out how to do something like this