Tables were not in HTML 2 but were in HTML 3.2.
(There were no, non-draft, specifications between those two versions, but HTML 3.0 also included tables.)
HTML 3.2 allows tables for layout but warns that there may be undesired side effects.
can be used to markup tabular material or for layout purposes. Note that the latter role typically causes problems when rending to speech or to text only user agents
HTML 4 removed that option:
should not be used purely as a means to layout document content
… and introduced support for stylesheets. (NB: The “divs vs tables” question is usually better expressed as “stylesheets vs tables”).
1
solved In what version of the HTML spec was