CSV to SortTable

Of course, it's not yet far enough in the past, PC-wise, to mention that through a big chunk of the history of the Internet, the preferred way to implement web pages was as HTML tables. Tables have huge potential ... and they are both mature, and cross-browser-compatible.

Most table-examples you see are simplistic, and do not show the real conditions that arise when trying to do something robust in a table. A realistic table-example is my Palm-models (mobile before Mobile) feature-chart. It doesn't fit on the screen. Scroll-bars don't serve as nice for sprawling tables, as they do for long pages or over-sized images.

This plugin advertises itself as a web-interface for a spreadsheet. That's why it's constantly trying to update the table. It's meant to let you continue working real-time in your spreadsheet-program, which is auto-saving to a CSV export-file, which Sortable Tables is using to update a table on your page. (Your spreadsheet might even be auto-editing itself, from various sources online.)

For fast-moving financial information, election-returns etc, the auto-update could be very
handy. Crucial even. For a lot of our normal content, though, this is going to be borderline nuts.

Not every table benefits from being sortable, either. An 'informed' ordering by a knowledgeable author can be the 'right' order, and value of the content is only degraded by changing it. But the sort-options does give tables some new legs. It can make it easier to find target-features in the Palm-chart.

In an effort to suppress the use of tables for page-presentation, there arose an 'active' deprecation-bias of tables, across the board and for any purpose. Tables acquired a whiff of evil, no matter what you were using them for.

But in reality, tables are an extremely adroit tool ... and it's no big surprise that there is a seeming (re)discovery of their power, as we watch a broad rebound of tables.