Tablesaw: A Flexible Tool for Responsive Tables

August 06, 2014

September 2023 Update: parts of this jQuery plugin are now available as an updated web component.

Originally posted as Tablesaw: A Flexible Tool for Responsive Tables on the Filament Group Lab.

Next to coming up with project names, managing tables in a responsive layout is one of the trickiest problems in web development. Semantically structured tables are notoriously difficult to style as anything other than… well… a table. On the other hand, cobbling together a pile of divs and spans into a table-like shape means giving up the semantic meaning, accessibility, and navigability of real table elements to represent tabular data, or it means jumping through hoops to recreate those features. When it comes down to it, the semantic benefits of real table elements make them our first and best choice.

Available on GitHub

Demos

Install using NPM

npm install tablesaw

Install using Bower

bower install filament-tablesaw

Originally posted at:

Screenshot image for https://v1.screenshot.11ty.dev/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.filamentgroup.com%2Flab%2Ftablesaw.html/opengraph//

Zach Leatherman is a builder for the web at Font Awesome and the creator/maintainer of Eleventy (11ty), an award-winning open source site generator. At one point he became entirely too fixated on web fonts. He has given 84 talks in nine different countries at events like Beyond Tellerrand, Smashing Conference, Jamstack Conf, CSSConf, and The White House. Formerly part of CloudCannon, Netlify, Filament Group, NEJS CONF, and NebraskaJS. Learn more about Zach »