Specification: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/tables.html
Multipage: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/#table-sorting-model:the-th-element-6
Complete: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#table-sorting-model:the-th-element-6
Referrer: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/tables.html

Comment:
"The sortable attribute ... indicates that the user agent is to allow the user
to sort the table."

"user agent is to allow the user" ???

The USER should allow the User-Agent!!; i.e. ALL tables (via table-element)
should ALWAYS be sortable, PERIOD -- and on EVERY column, with user-selected
MULTI-column (to the best ability and assumptions of the UA to manage
non--SORTED-conforming tables).  

The basic sorting-support is already in the UA since it must support the
"sortable" attribute.  This change would just make it ALWAYS active on EVERY
table, every column.  The "sortable" attribute could then become a
user-override-able flag to always DISPLAY the sort-buttons, or only on
header-hover.  USER could set sort-column-ordinality (and direction) via
header-column click+metakey(s) giving about 8 levels of table-sort (sum of 1 +
shift=1,ctrl=2,alt=4), and small stacking chevron-icons could show the
ordinality and direction (and after level-3 then 3 chevrons could be replaced
by 1 thick chevron)

Part 2: ALWAYS allow user to keep header row and/or column displayed when
scrolling, both within table, and also page itself.  Can already freeze a row
with CSS, but still need JS to control when to freeze. 

Part 3: ALWAYS allow user to rearrange columns!


Yes, there seem to be many Javascript routines available to do much of this,
but not every UA allows JS (eg Wikipedia restricts it -- but sorting does seem
to have 3-level multisort) and forcing new developers to find and understand
an existing version, or to create and debug their own version, wastes valuable
time; and MOST importantly, NORMAL users CANNOT modify table-code themselves,
but CAN greatly benefit.

Good Luck!


Posted from: 50.9.130.144
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS x86_64 6457.107.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/40.0.2214.115 Safari/537.36