So far in this chapter we have been moving in the direction of outputting more and more information from the server into the HTML so that our client-side scripts can remain as lean and efficient as possible. Now let's consider a different scenario, one in which a whole new set of information is displayed when JavaScript is available. Increasingly, full-fledged web applications are relying on JavaScript to deliver content as well as manipulate it once it arrives. In our third table sorting example, we'll do the same.
Tip
Graceful degradation note
To clarify this example, our HTML document contains no body content for this table. In a real-world situation, we'd prepopulate the table with content so that users without JavaScript could see the (unsortable) table data.
We'll start by writing two functions: buildRow(), which builds the HTML for a single table row, and buildRows()
, which uses $.map() to loop through all of the rows in the dataset, calling buildRow...