What if you have headings as the first column in each row? What if you have headings in the first column, and the first row?
Also, what is the use case for data overrides? In my opinion, it completely defeats the purpose when your intention is to take the contents of the table.
It's an alternative to the Datatables plugin. All its logic works on the set of data in JSON, so it first translates an html table into JSON, then vice versa.
The cool thing about this process is, you can write your own translate step to easily work with e.g. JSON from an Ajax request. And you can write your own render step to work with e.g. a styled list instead of a table.
By default, the translate step translates an html table to a JSON object, naming the attributes by the table column headings (underscore format by default, but can be hyphenated, snake-case, or lower-case too).
[1] http://os.alfajango.com/dynatable
EDIT: If anyone is interested, the part of the plugin that essentially does the "table to JSON" part is the getFromTable function here: https://github.com/JangoSteve/jquery-dynatable/blob/master/j...
Other useful things this function does is, determines whether the data is a string, number, boolean, or date (or other user-defined type) to do proper column sorting logic, and much more.
EDIT 2: Also, I can't speak for the author of the table-to-json plugin, but for dynatable, it's useful to have data-override values for the cells for cases like when you have a date in "Jan 1, 2013" format, which is meaningless when doing filter or sorting operations on the JSON; i.e. you could use the data-override to populate the proper date format so JS knows how to process it.
var getHeadings = function(table) {
var firstRow = table.find("tr:first").first();
return notNull(opts.headings) ? opts.headings : rowValues(firstRow);
};
table.find('thead tr').children('th,td')
var headings = table.find('thead th');
if (!headings.length) headings = table.find('th');
if (!headings.length) headings = table.find('tr:first td');http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...
This was developed with reference to a corpus of real web tables.
At any rate, it seems like trying to implement their algorithm verbatim in javascript would be pretty slow for large tables. Maybe it's better to just use it for inspiration.
Also, their algorithm seems to come at if from the perspective of, "I have a cell, what is its header?" It would be more efficient in reverse, if we could instead answering the question, "I have a header, what are its cells?". What dynatable does now is sort of a hybrid approach (we find the header cells, make a dictionary, then loop through the rows, assigning each cell value to its attribute in the dictionary). The issue is, according to that article, any table cell could potentially be a header cell, not just those in the header row or in th elements.
To add to your list, there is of course that old chestnut of "it doesn't support the full tables spec" (which in all fairness is quite complex).