Consolidate administrative tables into singular theme callback/component

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Thanks!

I have been pondering about tables in Drupal for quite a while.

We have all kinds of tables. HTML tables in the editor, or in templates. Views tables, and admin UI.

There is a table theme hook, which can make the header sticky. But views does not use this.

There are draggable tables for multivalue fields, and responsive tables that make columns disappear.

There are different styles and layouts for tables, like scrolling horizontally when they don't fit, or a small/compact version vs full width.

Lots of fixes are implemented in themes like Gin, and need to be rebuilt for your own. Try using your custom theme as the admin theme and you will encounter UI challenges that can be tedious to fix.

Views has a pretty powerful table display, but it's still limited. Modules like Views Aggregator Plus and Views Table Rowspan add additional features, but they can't be combined.

This issue started as a suggestion to use the table hook or something similar. Then it was asked if views could render the table. What seems to be missing is some kind of unified table API.

I recently looked into front end table components like DataTables (https://datatables.net/). But that made me question whether this (still jquery) library is any better than what we can already do with the views table (sort/filter/search via ajax).

There is the TanStack table (https://tanstack.com/table/latest), which is a different paradigm since it's sort of a full stack component, but unlike views, is not a query builder.

The thing I like about these libraries are that they are quite robust and fully documented. Making complex tables in Drupal can be pretty rough if you don't know about things like views development or advanced theming.

I can't quite visualize the solution I'm looking for. But I think these two libraries represent the major paradigm shift for drupal and web development. We used to render a table in the back end and sprinkle it with jquery on the front end. Now we want a unified component on the front/back end so we can reasonably work on more complex components without things becoming tangled or inconsistent.

A further question is whether tables are the right choice for these admin screens. Are they really tabular data, or are we just trying to display info in a grid? Responsive tables that collapse (IE tablesaw library) are generally preferred on mobile devices vs horizontal scrolling, especially for an interactive UI like a content type's fields config. I like the ability to copy and paste field settings into a spreadsheet, but having a usable UI on my device is more important.