As far as IE not supporting innerHTML...innerHTML was invented by IE and is still today NOT a DOM standard. Other browsers have adopted it because it's useful, which is why you can use it cross-browser. As far as dynamically changing tables, MSDN says "because of the specific structure required by tables, the innerText and innerHTML properties of the table and tr objects are read-only." I don't know how much of that was true initially, but clearly the modern browsers have figured it out while dealing with the complexities of table-layout.
Jeremy Keith's DOM Scripting