Browsers read through tables twice before displaying their contents, once to work out their structure and once to determine their content

Tables appear on the screen all in one go – no part of the table will appear until the entire table is downloaded and rendered

Tables encourage the use of spacer images to aid with positioning. CSS generally requires less code than cumbersome tables

All code to do with the layout can be placed in an external CSS document, which will be called up just once and then cached (stored) on the user’s computer; table layout, stored in each HTML document, must be loaded up each time a new page downloads