contao-responsive-tables

Enriching data tables in Contao with attributes so that you can linearize them for small screens like on mobile phones.

Use still need to adjust your stylesheet, though.

Making data tables readable on mobile phones

There are several approaches to format tables on small screens.

I'm focussing on the easiest one here: Linearizing everything so that all cells stack on eachother in vertical.

A properly structured data table has a table header with header cells that work as titles for the data cells in the same column. This is achievable with Contao's content element table by using the header option:

Name	Year	Age
Andy	1984	28
Simon	1989	24

Linearizing this table would result in one stack of header cells th on the top, followed by stacks of data cells td:

Name
Year of birth
Age

Andy
1984
28

Simon
1989
24

Since not all data explains itself without a header (or title), one solution is to hide the header and add the title to each data cell, which makes reading the data sets possible again:

Name Andy
Year 1984
Age 28

Name Simon
Year 1989
Age 24

How it works

This extension looks for a corresponding header cell for each data cell and adds an title-attribute (data-header in HTML 5) to each.

Using CSS pseudo elements, you can add those attributes above each cell (use data-header instead of title for HTML 5):

td[title]:before {
  display: block;
  font-weight: bold;
  content: attr(title);
}

The complete CSS

Using progressive enhancement, the basic CSS could look something like this:

table, thead, tfoot, tbody, tr, th, td {
  display: block;
}

tr {
  margin: .6em 0;
}

thead {
  height: 0; /* we show titles for each cell, not in the header */
  overflow: hidden;
}

/* show the title attribute above each data cell */
td[title]:before {
  display: block;
  font-weight: bold;
  content: attr(title); 
}

@media (min-width: 30em) { /* assume our reset table fits in there */ 
  table { display: table; }
  thead { display: table-header-group; }
  tfoot { display: table-footer-group; }
  tbody { display: table-row-group; }
  tr { display: table-row; }
  td, th { display: table-cell; }
  td[title]:before { content: none; }
}      

IE and progressive enhancement

Since there are some serious issues with table formatting in IE <= 8, you should avoid formatting tablets at all and keep the browsers's default rules.

IE <= 8 is used mainly on the desktop, so either work with max-width mediaqueries to linearize the table, or hide the table-stylesheet to this browser.

Licence

Copyright (C) 2013 Andy Pillip

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.