a text formating & cpu question

Hello, Question 1: A long time ago, I started my first big project using php3 and MySQL that would return on a query a listing of info from the database that was displayed in the browser with nested tables. If a user really wanted to test the limits of the database, he/she could get back over 3000 lines. Being that html tables were being used to display the info, a large number of tables were being created, and would crash netscape. I pretty much shelved this project for this reason. I'm now working on a similar project that won't return so many lines, but I would like to be able to use something other than html tables to display the info in a neat manner. Is there any php related things I could use to format a list in a browser other than html tags? could someone point me in the right direction? Question 2: Is there a way for php to detect the cpu speed of a users computer? Thank you