In the 15 years since the HTML table element was first incorporated into HTML 2.0, it has been on a constant roller coaster ride. Upon its introduction it was a revelation, it was a new way for web designers to present detailed data in structured tabular format, it made our life easier and we loved it. But as is the nature of web development, it was pushed further and further to do even more. Pretty soon the main use of tables was no longer tabular data, it was used as a handy and quick way to control the layout of a complicated web page. Yes, we loved it even more.

But that is were the love story ends and its bad rep begins.Using the table element for web layouts proved to be hard to modify, obtrusive and, more importantly, it caused major accessibility and usabilty problems. Thankfully, CSS came to the rescue, and HTML tables were duly dumped on the web design scrap heap. Tables were finally relegated to the position it was originally introduced for: Presenting tabular data.

Out of the box the tables are very, very bland, reasonably hard to style, its very difficult to display complex data effectively and you are limited to its basic functionality. This is were jQuery comes in, the every day web design super-hero.