Table vs CSS positionning

[ShadowCaster]

If you plan to do a big webcomic where the web page is bigger than the screen, you can use big table or CSS positionning (please suggest other methods).
Here are the advantages and drawbacks I found with both techniques :

1)
- Tables, is the simplest to do, WISIWIG editors can create them with little or no cleaning of the code after that. I'ts the most compatible also, and they can easaly be created by hand. For vertical scrolling only comics or horizontal only scrolling comics, they can easily be centered on the screen.

- Table are more costly for the browser, and good care has to be given that every row, table and image has it's dimention specified, or you might have to wait for the whole page to be downloaded before being able to read.
Tables are defined Row by row, and browsers download images in the order they appear in the source, so if the reading path is not from left to right, then from top to bottom, the reader will have to wait.
For example, in the warlus improv, you have to wait for half the images to load before being able to read the second panel because the page has two lines and the second pannel is in the second line. Using nesting tables or grouping images can sometimes help but then you lose the simplicity of the approch.

2)
- CSS positionning, is more complex, WISIWIG editors create a lot of non portable garbage code (If you know a good editor for this, please tell me),
and if you do edit it by hand, a lot of coordinates calculation is required.
Some people have browsers not supporting it or disable it.
On the other hand, you can do image overlapping that is a good way to reduce bandwith by reusing images when pannels only slightly differ, or combine multiple planes that compress better with different file formats.
Once the comic is finished, you can safely reorder the images in the code in the reading order, even if the reading path is a spiral starting from the center of the screen. (in which case you should probably wait for Merlin to relese the Tarquin Engine)

Maybe I could write a convertion tool from Table to CSS if people are interessed ?