In the beginning... the web was never envisioned to be what it is today. The notion that anybody would want to do layout like publishing software didn't cross anyone's mind. Originally the web didn't even have images! It was just text and links. It was just a way to pass text documents around easily. Of course, then the designers came along and said "I want it to look like this" and webmasters (as we were called back then) had to figure out some way to do it. The only realistic way to more or less do it was to use tables (which, of course, was not their intent, but when all you have is a hammer...)