I'd like to be able to use only structural markup and avoid any hint of presentational markup. I'd like to be able to have MacEdition's pages conform to HTML 4.0 Strict instead of HTML 4.0 Transitional. But I just can't do it. So instead, I risk the wrath of markup purists everywhere and use tables for layout. I'd love it to be otherwise.
Browsers generally wait until they've received an entire table before rendering it.
It's a good way to break your readers' concentration by making them wait. And it would be so nice to just use a few DIV tags with id or class attributes to define the layout. That would be a fast site for users and one that is easily redesigned. But it's just not feasible with current browsers. Like What You Expected.