A very useful feature on many websites these days, ebay comes to mind, is that
you can change the sort order of tables by clicking on the column header. This
is not currently possible in MediaWiki and the table can only be displayed in
the way that it is coded.

As an example, the [[en:List of RSPB nature reserves]] article will shortly be
redone into a table format. It will likely contain the columns:
Name | County | Area | Habitat | Key species

Having this sorted by all of these columns will be very useful for different
purposes - e.g. to view the largest reserves, to view reserves that are
wetlands, or to view reserves in a county.

Currently to do this we will need to make and maintain 5 separate tables. With
this proposal only one table would be needed as the reader could sort by
whichever column they wanted. Ideally the sorting would be reversible (A->Z and
Z->A) and be carried over to allow queries like wetland habitats viewed in
decreasing size order (e.g. sort by size then by habitat).

See also bug #2194 as it may be something that could/needs to be done at the
same time as the proposed table: namespace

Version: unspecified
Severity: normal