Are tables slow in rendering?

[UJ]

I had somebody (who was an idiot) tell me that tables are slow in rendering?
That you shouldn't do things like tables inside of tables.

Is that true?

I think she didn't know what she was talking about but I just wanted to
confirm with people.

TIA - J.

 

[Guest]

Perhaps you should challenge this person to a race. But first, ask what they
intend to use instead of tables!
Peter

 

[Greg Collins [Microsoft MVP]]

With todays computers, you'd probably never notice -- but yes, it takes more processing power to render a table than it does a div or a span -- especially if the table cells do not use fixed widths.

In general, unless you have an extremely complicated design with your tables, I wouldn't worry about it.

 

[Gaijin]

Tables are slow to render for two reasons.

1) A table does not display until it i closed. Thats why you often see
slow loading sites, where the site is blank, and then everything
appears all at once, rather than coming in gradually. This is not an
actual slow down, but an apparent slow down to the user, because they
are used to seeing things come in gradually.

2) Browsers display nested tables very slowly (relatively). If you have
a table, inside a table, inside a table or something (particularly if
you have a table with a large number of rows, where each row contains a
child table). This is an efficiency issue within the browser. Older
versions of netscape (4.7 ish) were VERY VERY slow with this. My work
had a page that would load in 5 seconds in IE that took 2 minutes in
Netscape due to nested tables. This has gotten better as time passed,
however it still exists. currently, Firefox is slightly faster than IE
at nested table rendering.

In general, the industry has moevd away from using tables for layout,
and you should probably use CSS to lay out your page now. However, for
data that is tabular (the results of queries say) tables are the
correct choice.

Jason Coyne
www.geekswithblogs.com/gaijin42