While you might not consider a data grid to be all that exciting, they do offer a way for site visitors to interact with large amounts of data and understand it in a way they might not be able to otherwise. One of the most exciting developments in HTML5 is the introduction of a grid element, which allows us to easily create an interactive data grid using only markup. However, it's one of the new elements for which browser support is lagging—there is little, if any, browser support for the time being, and it could be years before we're able to make use of this new element. Luckily, we can use jQuery to fill in the gap until the new grid element is ready for primetime.
In this chapter, we'll learn the following topics:
Turning an ordinary table into an interactive data grid using the DataTables jQuery plugin from Allan Jardine
Customizing the appearance and behavior of the data grid with help from the jQuery UI Themeroller