Just some more random thoughts.

Perhaps this a useful scheme:

1. The user creates an XML-like file which describes the tables to use (a template can be provided, so they just have to copy & paste and fill-in the blanks

   <TABLE>
   <NAME>tablename</NAME>
   <TITLE>This is the title of the first table>/TITLE>
   <COLUMN>First Column Title</COLUMN>
   <COLUMN>Second Column Title</COLUMN>
   <COLUMN>Third Column Title</COLUMN>
   </TABLE>
   <TABLE>
   <NAME>tablename</NAME>
   <TITLE>This is the title of the second table>/TITLE>
   <COLUMN>First Column Title</COLUMN>
   <COLUMN>Second Column Title</COLUMN>
   <COLUMN>Third Column Title</COLUMN>
   </TABLE>
   [download]

2. Then you have as much flat text files as there are tables (each with the name of the table as filename), which are really tab-separated value files with one record per line, containing the data of this table..
3. You could then either compile this bunch of files once into the web-site you need or interprete them on-the-fly for each access to the site (this means the user can keep on changing the tables and data and only has to upload the files to the server by FTP or so -- of course you would need some checking the uploaded files to see that they are "valid").

As the structure is rather simple, you will perhaps not need a full-blown XML::Parser in your program.

CountZero

"If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law