In school, one of my professor use to say that options (things that you are comparing) should always be listed in the top row i.e. across the top.
So for e.g. if I was doing a comparison of search engines - Yahoo, Google and Bing - I would list them in the top row. And the first column would list the criterion that I used in the comparison.
e.g.
http://security-basics.blogspot.com/2009/07/tables.html
Is this best practice from a usability perspective? Or was it just a urban myth?
