You can often avoid using HTML tables by using Cascading Style Sheets instead. I used to try and do this a lot, and it worked great with the Internet Explorer and Opera browsers.

The problem is that Netscape 4.x does not really support stylesheets in a meaningful way. So while IE and Opera users would see my page, Netscape 4.x users would get a blank page.

Several years ago there were a lot of complaints about Netscape's inadequate support for CSS. I do not know whether they have fixed the problem.

But I would say consider using CSS instead of tables to format your output, and then see whether any Netscape browser versions that you wish to support have fixed Netscape's CSS problems.