OT: why are LAMP sites slow?

[Paul Rubin]

"M.E.Farmer" <mefjr75 at hotmail.com> writes:
> To emulate a table you use the div and span tag.
> (really you can do just about anything with div and span)

Hmm, that's pretty interesting, I didn't realize you could specify
width's with CSS.  Thanks.  http://glish.com/css/9.asp shows a
2-column example.

I don't know that the browser necessarily renders that faster than it
renders a table, but there's surely less crap in the HTML, which is
always good.  I may start using that method.

I remember seeing something a long time ago where someone used normal
html tags to create something like tab stops, so he could just place
things where he wanted them without the browser having to read the
whole page to automatically size the columns.  But I haven't been able
to figure out what tags he used for that, and don't remember where I
saw it.

As you can probably tell, I'm ok with basic HTML but am no wizard.
I'm more interested in backend implementation.