HTML is not intended to be a layout language. The medium may not even be a screen. But we all want a nice layout, and the method of choice is an HTML table. Be aware, though, that the content of a table will not appear until the entire table has been downloaded.
Regular text shows up as soon as enough has been downloaded to make a line.
Always specify the image size. If the image is a link, let the ALT text describe the link so the visitor can click on it without waiting for the image to load. Try breaking big tables of data up into a few smaller tables to minimize the load time. The W3C description of CSS sounds very appealing. The trouble is that the major browsers, Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer , do not implement CSS as described in the specification, nor do they implement it uniformly.