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I've always been confused by google's use of tables and inline styles in their homepage also. Is it to shrink the file size and send less over the wire? Is it to maintain support for IE 4 or some other archaic browser?

Using one of the css frameworks like yui grids or malo gives you table like designs quickly and easily. Yeah there could still be cases where a table is easier for layout but I feel like there are less and less excuses for that.

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Tables probably for cross-browser support with minimal code size.

Inline css and javascript for 1 http request instead of 3. Much faster, and less load. The content-length of the google home page is 2752 bytes (gzip).

That doesn't shrink the file size, but loading a single file is faster than loading one and the second. What does shrink the file size is getting rid of new lines, tabs comments and so forth. Note how a google result page is a lot of text, but actually typically 10 lines.

For the same reason jquery is offered minified and YUI offers a tool to "compress" javascript and CSS: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/compressor/

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