Cocoa Touch's UITableView allows a user to scroll through large numbers of data rows with good performance because it recycles table rows. Rather than create a GUI element for every single data row, a limited number of table rows is created, and simply updated with the relevant data as the user scrolls, giving the illusion of navigating up and down a very large number of table rows.
Has anyone seen this done in javascript? Is there a plugin available anywhere that will do this for me?
Actually the algorithm is not difficult at all. If you know javascript you should be able to write this. The algorithm only needs the height of a cell and the height of the table.
I only know these two: Apple's Dashcode javascript Framework has an implementation of a Table. You could take a look and see if that is what you need. Or Cappuccino Framework which is basically Objective-J but behind the scenes is Javascript.
I don't think that this is necessary in JS.
It is done this way in Obj-C in order not to allocate and initiate the views in table rows.
In JS the rows are just text (no allocation needed) that you should hold somewhere anyway - you might hold only the text without the HTML and wrap it with HTML when the row becomes visible, but I don't think it is worth your time.
I don't believe that this approach will make the HTML table faster...