1850893 - [meta] Stop extending a table for the tree-view

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: General, task, P3)

Description

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

Using an HTML Table element for the initial TreeView implementation has been very beneficial since it allowed us to inherit the elastic resizing of columns.
We reached a point where the DOM reflow performance is affected by the table structure.
Now that we have many tests and good performance for the current widget, we can explore its rebuild with simple divs.

Comment 1

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

Attachment: WIP: Bug 1850893 - Stop extending a table element for the TreeView widget.

Comment 5

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

Geoff, Martin, what do you think about this?
Is this worth pursuing this maybe around Q4 this year or we don't have any more performance and DOM rendering concerns about extending a table?

The WIP patch I attached is a proof of concept to confirm the possibility of having the columns resizing feature behaving properly and it seems to work.

Comment 6

[Martin Giger [:freaktechnik]]

My gut feeling is that it's probably better in the longer term, as the table layout is the exception for the usage of that widget, and other more list but with freeform data contents usages grow. It not being a table will also make it so we don't have to deal with some annoying quirks of tables when we're doing things that aren't really tables.

I do wonder what exactly the impact is for assistive technologies though. (It might be better there too?)