Art and Commentary

Getting frozen, or fixed, header and footer rows in a table is a
frustrating exercise, especially if you need to support Internet
Explorer 7. In searching for solutions to what you would think would
be a common problem, I discovered two plug-ins for jQuery that ease
the pain of displaying tables with such features:

• Flexigrid
  Offers a ton of features, but is maintained by a lone developer who
  barely has a web presence at all.
• DataTables
  Lots of configuration options for dynamically loading, searching,
  sorting, and even summarizing data; however, it does not offer a
  built-in solution for frozen header/footers.

Trim whitespace from a string in Javascript:

  String.prototype.trim = function() {
    return this.replace(/^\s*/, "").replace(/\s*$/, "");
  }