Lars Aronsson wrote:
Should I use divs instead of tables?
You could and it would avoid the flak from one cranky bug submitter. I'm not so sure that tables that are *not* nested are significantly more efficient than equivalent divs. I can see that under certain circumstances, it would appear that nested divs would be similar in performance to nested tables - both require the browser to load the entire pack of info to the end of the outermost enclosing element before they can render.
I've used both tables and divs for bar charts and can't notice a performance difference. I haven't seen any benchmarks nor have I run any - I'd be interested in seeing if these assumptions of mine are valid or if there are other factors that I haven't considered.
I guess SVG would be the best, but can SVG images be generated inline from a template?
SVG would be interesting if it could be directly rendered. Not so great if it has to be converted to png first (except that it's server load instead of browser load).
Mike