responsive dt creates invalid html

[craigh]

https://live.datatables.net/tuhikeno/1/edit?html,js,output

to see the errors, run the demo above and move the output to a new window, narrow the window to force the responsive plugin to work then validate the html in the window with W3C Markup validation service.

Once done you will see many errors like

Error: A table row was 6 columns wide and exceeded the column count established using column markup (4).

Obviously, this is the responsive plugin doing what it is intended to do, which is to hide some columns. Is there something datatables can do to update the layout to end up with valid markup also?

[AllanJard]

Hi - I guess it is because the W3C validator doesn't take account of the display: none th/td cells in the table rows. I can understand that, since it is a markup validator only.

Way back with version 1 of Responsive, it used the column visibility features of the DataTable to show / hide columns, but people wanted to be able to do that independently of Responsive. So I switch it to using display: none, thinking that it would be better that removing the elements from the table and causing conflicts with the column visibility. That as worked well, up until this report :).

The answer is yes, I would like to get this fixed and remove the cells from the HTML rather than hide them. However, it is likely to be some months before I can work on a piece as significant as this, due to other development priorities just now. Specifically I'm working on DataTables 3 which will require an update to all extensions as well, and that is going to get a lot of time.