HTML is was designed by people who thought of it as ink on the paper on a single page of a single column magazine. Everything else is stretching it. People abused HTML tables, then they abused floated DIV-s. First thing that has anything to do with sane, non-printlike placement of the contents of the document is flexbox, yet to be consistently implemented.

Delphi 4 (1998, that's around time HTML4.0 was published) had better layout facilities for designing UX than html had year ago.