It has been advocated many times that tables shouldn't be use in HTML for layout purposes. This page shows one way to create a 3 columns layout using CSS only.
HTML is a structural language, which means it is - or should be - used to add structure into a text through tags. The table tag should then only be used to format data into a table to relate columns with rows.
But since the apparition of tables in HTML, it has been very often used for layout purpose, usually split a web page into columns. Besides the fact that it breaks the meaning of HTML, it doesn't help either in various cases that we could summarize by the difficulty to parse or render a table in some context (disabilities, view port restrictions, ...).
This document describes one way to create a 3 columns layout and links to other layout techniques.