Having lived/worked through that period of time, it was due to rendering. The entire table had to be loaded before it could be rendered to the browser. If your

Having lived/worked through that period of time, it was due to rendering. The entire table had to be loaded before it could be rendered to the browser. If your entire site was wrapped inside a table, nothing would load until it all did. If I remember correctly. I'm not sure if that's still an issue with modern browsers, and our faster connection speeds, it if increased processing and network speeds have made it insignificant now. Edit: SE answer with more: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/6037/3403 https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/6037/3403