In first instance, I wouldn't worry about performance, but more about semantics. If it's tabular data, use a If you really, really worry about performance, then the answer would still depend on the client used. MSIE for example is known to be slow in table rendering. You should at least test yourself in different browsers. If this worriness is caused by large data, then I'd consider to introduce paging/filtering of the data you're about to show.. If it are just block elements representing a layout element, use