[whatwg] Sortable Tables

[Ojan Vafai]

On Tue, Nov 6, 2012 at 11:25 AM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:

> On Thu, 1 Jul 2010, Christoph Päper wrote:
> >
> > It's a common task outside HTML to sort tables by one or more of its
> > columns.
> >
> > There does seem interest among web content providers in making tables
> > client-side sortable since there are several Javascript solutions to do
> > just that, eg. <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Sorting>,
> > <http://tablesorter.com/docs/>. From these we can learn what would be
> > needed from markup to help sorting algorithms. None of this must be
> > behaviorial, but descriptionary.
> >
> > For starters, only rows inside ‘tbody’s shall be reordered. For now
> > columns don’t have to be reordered, ie. only vertical, no horizontal
> > sorting. Nevertheless the design should make it possible to add the
> > other direction later.
> >
> > Not every table has content that makes sense to be sorted in a different
> > order. So sortable tables should be marked as such. Note that ‘col’ and
> > ‘colgroup’ elements are hardly supported.
> >
> > Not every column has content that makes sense to be sorted in a
> > different order. So non-sortable columns inside sortable tables should
> > be marked as such.
> >
> > There are different ways to sort, eg. numeric, temporal or alphabetic
> > and ascending or descending. Therefore columns should bear information
> > how they should be sorted, ie. what kind of content their cells have.
> >
> > Several columns may be used for sorting by some kind of priority.
> >
> > The original order must be restorable.
> >
> > Cell content may not consist of the string that should be used verbatim
> > for sorting purposes, eg. leading articles or similar numbers with
> > different units (‘g’, ‘kg’, ‘t’ …). Cells should have an optional
> > attribute indicating their sort key. The ‘time’ element already provides
> > the necessary metadata features for temporal sorting – maybe there
> > should be more of such elements instead.
> >
> > There may be columns that shall remain stable, eg. rank numbers.
>
> This is a very interesting idea.
>
> Is this something browser vendors would be interested in implementing? I'm
> hesitant to add a feature for this (which could be somewhat involved)
> before having the definite interest of some browser implementors.


This is a use-case that I absolutely think it makes sense to address. This
is extremely common whenever people use tables for actual tabular data and
it's non-trivial to do in a way that performs well. I'd have to see a more
concrete proposal in order to evaluate whether I'd be interested in
implementing it.

A couple thoughts off the top of my head:
1. Would sorting actually reorder the DOM nodes or just change their visual
order? It's not clear to me which one is better. I think the former is what
you'd want most of the time.
2. What values should the sort property allow. One idea is that it takes a
JS function similar to what JavaScript's sort function takes. If you leave
it out then it just does alphanumeric sort.
3. What elements does it go on? I don't see what it would do on a td. I
could see putting it on a th though. Also, it's not clear to me what would
get sorted. For example, in some tables, you would group trs inside tbodys
and want to sort those.