Suppose we're making a strategy game (think Civilization) in a web browser. The game has a visible map portion - say 30x30 squares. Each square is 30x30px and has several overlaid images - the terrain, resources, units, roads, etc. The classical way of drawing this would be with a huge <table> where each cell would contain absolutely positioned images. It would probably be rendered in Javascript to reduce traffic. But it's still several thousand images and a huge table.

Can the browser take it? Will the performance not drop below any acceptable limits? Alternatively I could keep a pre-rendered map image with as many overlays as possible, but that would be more work, I think.