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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report
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CSS...good! gzip...not so good! (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, embedded tables can cause clients on slow machines to think real hard before rendering the page. Most browsers need to see the end table tag (</table>) before they will display anything on the page. Therefore, if the page can be redesigned so that there are a series of smaller tables, unembedded tables near the top of the page, those tables will be visible on the client-side sooner. This is a good trick to use if you have a giant, spreadsheet-looking thing that you need to generate. CSS can and does help in many, but not all, situations. I've become quite attached to CSS, foregoing my support for older browsers.
gzipping the page before it leaves apache seems like a waste of resources unless the page is large (let's say over 50K). Otherwise, the overhead of gzipping and ungziping will probably consume an transmission speed gains.
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Re:CSS...good! gzip...not so good! (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not sure how mod_deflate does it in apache 2.0, though. at any rate, compression is about saving bandwidth and not necessarily about saving client or server resources or speeding up a site.