Does having a lot of nested tables add to load time on an HTML website?

Question

Does having a lot of nested tables add to load time on an HTML website?

Answer 1

well, technically it does.

every character in the code increases the load time by a bit.

for instance,  a web page that just has the word "hi"  in it will take a certain amount of time to load.  if you change it to "hello"  it will take a little longer.

the question then becomes;

when is it too much?

keep in mind that all html/css/javascript, etc.  is just text .

and text loads really, really fast.

it is the images and videos and sound files that slow down page load.

oh, and the worst thing is the ad servers.  If you are running ads on your pages using one of the main adserver companies ( like tribal fusion, or doubleclick, etc. )then that will slow down your pages as well.

I also agree with the person above,  when people start yelling about how tables are bad and old fashioned and load slow, they are just being css snobs.

The reality is that unless you use external style sheets for your css, it is just the same amount of code if not more.

Answer 2

Run for your life! He's using table tags! Oh no! Where are the children?  We don't have time for the children, Martha, here comes a deprecated <center> tag!

Tables are fine.  They're not the preferred way of doing things any more, but they're far easier to understand and work with than the equivalent CSS.  And for many years, they were the ONLY consistent way of getting a structured layout, so they're still ingrained into many websites.

Will they add *load* time? Not really.  Or, it depends.  If you've got some huge table (thousands or more of cells), then maybe, in which case you can always try removing closing </td>'s and </tr>'s to save on load (browsers effectively ignore them, even though it's bad practice to leave them out).

But since you refer to *NESTED* tables, I suspect what you're referring to is processing time on the client machine.  A long time ago (late 90's) Netscape (and possibly other browsers) became abysmally slow when you nested tables beyond a certain depth.  IIRC, 2 tables deep was fine, but around 3 or 4 there was a sudden brick wall of slowness that would slam into the user and delay the display of the page by a LOT.  We're talking about a jump from around 1 second to more than 10 seconds (I don't remember exactly-- I seem to remember some taking whole minutes to display).

But that old bug got fixed in Netscape when they adopted the MSIE algorithm for processing tables (around the year 2000 somewhere).  It was a bit more effort on the part of the program, but for the end-user, it was far better.  Especially because it would allow the user to see content in a table before the table was even finished loading.

Anyway, your end users aren't going to notice a difference unless your table contains thousands of cells, in which case you should think about a better way of conveying your data.  I'd recommend not using tables, and switching to a CSS version (since it's the more modern way of handling these things), but it's not really all that big of a deal.

DaveE

Answer 3

Yes, it does for IE and related engine driven browsers.  IE parses tables twice to set layout of page and what needs to be placed where.  Not sure about other browsers, but it is one reason not to use tables for page design and especially nested tables.  

Use of clean HTML code and CSS will help immensely towards helping load times ( all other things being equal ). Most people do not include a proper doctype and that throws every browser into Quirks Mode.  Then your pages are parsed the way the browsers want and not how you expect them to be.

And please don't listen to KorbanD 's advice.  True, tables are for tabular data, and people, who do care that a browser displays their pages properly, will write and use proper CSS/HTML coding on their pages.  It helps to make sure people see your pages the way you want them seen.

Ron

Answer 4

Not necessarily. I know CSS and DIVs are the new rage (Web 2.0 and all that), but if you're new to Web Design - or if you just don't care, nested tables aren't going to significantly decrease the performance of your page(s).

Here's why. Even if your page contained 20,000 characters, it's a 20k page and even on a dial-up connection it's going to load within about 3 seconds. If you cut that page in half (so, let's pretend you took out all the nested tables and replaced them with DIVs and proper CSS tags) your 10k page would load in 1.5 seconds on a 56k dial-up. So, that sounds amazing right! Well, to you and I it does...but to your end-user, it's absolutely transparent. They'll never notice.

So, use nested tables...know there's probably a better way...and when you get some time, learn how to do it. But it's not worth rewriting a page that's already been written.

Oh, and in closing...tables aren't bad, if you have tabular data...that's what a table is for. Don't turn into one of these CSS Zen Guru's who are all too proud of the fact that they have no tables in their code....because hey, nobody cares.

Answer 5

NO.