The HTML specification's algorithm for determining the applicable headers for a table cell might be useful:
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...
This was developed with reference to a corpus of real web tables.
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...
This was developed with reference to a corpus of real web tables.
At any rate, it seems like trying to implement their algorithm verbatim in javascript would be pretty slow for large tables. Maybe it's better to just use it for inspiration.
Also, their algorithm seems to come at if from the perspective of, "I have a cell, what is its header?" It would be more efficient in reverse, if we could instead answering the question, "I have a header, what are its cells?". What dynatable does now is sort of a hybrid approach (we find the header cells, make a dictionary, then loop through the rows, assigning each cell value to its attribute in the dictionary). The issue is, according to that article, any table cell could potentially be a header cell, not just those in the header row or in th elements.