I understand that Nokia phones don't render links, text, images on the same line. I tried a table, but the phone renders the table grid, which looks really messy.
Is there another way to render a link and some simple text on the same line? (Maybe making the table grid invisible)
You are right. The early browsers treated each display 'object' separately and displayed each on a new line.
Such objects were:-
A text paragraph
An image
A link
Also, if I remember, the scrolling behaviour was such that it scrolled images such that the top of the next display object appeared at the top of the screen. This meant that if you had an image taller than the screen, you could never se the bottom part.