gmiller - 4:50 am on Jan 26, 2001 (gmt 0)

jmirick: I wasn't aware of any cols attribute for tables... is this an NN4-specific extension?

Be careful to pay attention to the difference between Navigator (4.x and earlier) and NS6 rendering engines. The two are basically unrelated and have very different performance (and rendering) characteristics.

As with other browsers, CSS is the way to go for speed.

On NS6, stay as far away from FONT elements and nested tables as you can. Be absolutely sure you close all your FONT elements, since unclosed FONTs slow the renderer to a crawl if you have enough of them. Some changes have been made in Mozilla to speed up the FONT problem dramatically, but those didn't make it into NS6.0. Nested tables get you O(n^2) behavior currently due to a bug that hasn't been fixed yet. NN4 doesn't do well with them either. NN4 does handle unclosed FONT elements much better, though.

COL elements work on NS6, but are ignored by NN4 (AFAICT).

Splitting up tables helps with most older browsers, including NN4 I believe (but probably isn't a huge gain with NS6 and IE5 due to their thorough support for incremental rendering--there may cases where it helps a lot, though, since they can't afford to update the display every time a new chunk comes in).