I'm looking for a way to publish large tables on the web.?

Question

hello all,
I'm working in the field of official statistics, and we often need to publish data on the web on tabular form. The problem is that very often, the tables are wider than the screen of the reader. But to the best of my knowledge, there is no universal, elegant solution to let the viewer explore a table, that is scroll through a table while keeping the title part of the table (top rows, leftmost columns) always visible.
This problem is becoming more acute with the need to publish on smaller devices.

To sum things up, I'm looking for a component I could use to take a table structured in XML, and display it in a delimited space, where I could scroll in the table although the parts of my table defined as title would always remain visible.

Has anyone heard of an existing solution?

Answer 1

my method to do exactly what you want is to abandon tables.

by serving the data in a simple text (or xml) file, you can use ajah (or ajax) to build the tables on the fly. with a few rules you can build the tables in javascript that you didn't have to build on the server.

with the http://jquery.com javascript component library and the many table plugins Your data would be presentable in many different ways.. and introducing new methods of display would be actually easy!

you are not alone! the list members on http://jquery.com are attacking similar problems daily!

Answer 2

Look here
http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/gr/column4/