Ken Månsson
> But the download time experienced by the user is
> more then the actual download time. The time needed by
> the browser to render the page after it is downloaded
> must be added.
>
My recent experience with this very issue is that both
download and rendering time is _greatly_ reduced using
CSS when I do _not_ use tables for page layout.

Using tables for layout seems to be very hard on the
rendering engine and usually defeats progressive
rendering as well.  By contrast, carefully planned,
positioned, displayed, and floated elements render
quickly and incrementally as the data comes in,
resulting in the user seeing a much faster download.
Further, external stylesheets are cached by the browser,
so subsequent loads of similar pages take even less
time.

In fact, I have been so disappointed with table
rendering speed I often put simple tabular data into
sized elements, as in the following CSS fragment.  It
works very well and renders quickly.

DIV.namelist {width:43em;vertical-align:top;}
SPAN.firstname {width:10em;}
SPAN.mi {width:3em;}
SPAN.lastname {width:10em;}
SPAN.email {width:20em;}

-David

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