[whatwg] Web Apps 1.0 - DataGrid

Hi,

I'm currently struggling to write a web application for the company
where I work and I'm hoping you guys could make it easier for future
versions of me.

What I'm trying to do is have a large table of information where the
row and column headers are fixed but the contents scroll. It is possible
in JavaScript at the moment. For a good example (not written by me) see:
http://www.litotes.demon.co.uk/example_scripts/tableScroll.html

However, if the sizes of the cells change dynamically, resizing the
"static" cells to match etc. is a lot of work. I have a cross-browser
version now but I'm still hitting lots of little bugs and I'd love it
if it was built into the browser - it would also nicely degrade in old
browsers - authors could either link to hacked-together custom
solutions as we currently do or just let all the cols scroll off the
page in old browsers.

How you would describe this in html is probably for more experienced
members of the mailing list to sort out but from the point of view of
implementing this spec it would be simpler to only allow one group
of columns and one group of rows to be frozen which have to be at the
left/right or top/bottom of the table respectively.

If the child of the datagrid was a table then the thead/tfoot elements
with a special class would make a natural place for fixed rows.
The fixed columns would be harder, maybe a colgroup with a special
class.

I think it would be extremely useful for a broad range of things. But
what do people think? Would it be possible/sensible to implement such
a thing? And how should an author specify they want it?

Thanks for any feedback.

Jon Levell

Received on Friday, 10 June 2005 12:38:04 UTC