Another thing is that browsers tend to wait until all tags which could affect size are closed to render an element. This is particularly important with tables, which often will not be rendered until every cell is received, along with the closing tags. Printing the data outside of a table will cause it to render as it comes in, at least in Mozilla and Netscape.

It's possible that specifying the width and height of the enclosing element might make it render without waiting, for example giving a width and height attribute for a table, but I'm not sure about this.

And of course, all of this is very browser dependent.