Make table rows sortable

[marcoscaceres]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
When there is a big table...

Describe the solution you'd like
It would be nice for big tables to sort by column.

[sidvishnoi]

Like on a button/header click or as a pre-process step?

[marcoscaceres]

@sidvishnoi, see w3c/did-extensions#273 ... but will try to get clear requirements from there.

I think we might want dynamic (click-based), not preprocessed... so including another .runtime.

[iherman]

Some thoughts on requirements:

• Sort should be on the text content of the <td> elements and not on (HTML) elements. Sounds obvious, but I saw simple tools that, when sorting, did sorted <a href="...">XYZ</a> before <b>ABC</b>...
• Probably also obvious, but sorting means only on rows with within a <tbody> section, not on <thead> section. If there are several <thead> elements then... I would think that the corresponding <tbody> elements are sorted independently of the others, ie, every <thead> - <tbody> pair is a separate "sorting context". But opinions may differ on this.
• I am not sure what to do with a simple table without the <thead>-<tbody> pairs. I would not be shocked if those tables could not be sorted :-)
• The user should have a possibility to choose between ascending and descending order (usually through either a choice in the header using some icons, or by repeatedly clicking on the header).
• Whether a table is sortable or not could be controlled, e.g., by special classes.
• Bonus feature: possibility to automatically cut a large table to smaller chunks (say, 10 entries) and move from one chunk to the other via some extra user interface. (This is a bonus feature, ie, it may not be a requirement in the first round.)

[TallTed]

@iherman covered all the requirements I was about to write, and a few I hadn't thought of just now (though similar have bitten me in the past). Having these features available will be of great benefit to many spec contributors/authors/editors/etc.

[gkellogg]

While you're in there: I've had requests for floating column heads, so that for large tables with many columns, you can always see the column title.

[marcoscaceres]

Ah, yeah. We should make those "sticky" - good suggestion @gkellogg. We can probably prototype that here and then push the CSS to the /tr-design repo.

[iherman]

Just wondering whether there are some thoughts about the timing of this feature request...

[marcoscaceres]

@sidvishnoi created a draft #3812. I wonder if we could release that as an MVP and build it up over time?

[marcoscaceres]

Closing this sortable tables request. After 5 years with no progress, and given that dynamic table sorting is better served by external JavaScript libraries that can be included via preProcess, this isn't something we're building into ReSpec's core.