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This is straight out of the CSS renaissance: There used to be a world, where the only sensible way to get something look a certain way on the web was using tables. But since using the actual table element, for anyone who cared about html semantics and accessibility, was a no go, assigning "display: table" to a non-semantic element was the next best option (or rather the least bad).

It will not surprise you to learn that this concept was not exactly well understood (to be fair, most things were not well understood, including js) and people started building all sorts of actual data tables out of divs with "display: table" applied, because apparently that's how you were supposed to do it.

Nowadays this is obsolete, of course, mostly thanks to flexbox but also grid.




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