technically speaking, if you know what you're doing, you can style a table dlayout hevily with css, so all it has to do is render the table and it's couple cells, so you're not saving that much.

of course, this refers to the situation where css hasn't bee completely optimized, such as having 2 columns each a different colour, be the same height in appearence - having the shorter column span the taller's height (without the use of graphics).