Visually distinguish integer and text columns

[simonw]

It would be useful if I could tell from looking at the table page if a column was a integer or a text (or a float I guess?). This is particularly important for knowing if it safe to sort by that column.

[simonw]

Not sure the best way to do this. Here's an example using very subtle colour changes - but I'm worried it's not at all discoverable:

That's with #4c0077 for floats and #666666 for integers.

[simonw]

I like the gray. The purple is a bit confusing.

I could have both integers and floats show up as gray? The floating point should help show which is which.

Maybe I could default floating point columns with integer values in them to 11.0 just to make it clear that they are floats?

[simonw]

Turns out 1.0 and 2 stored in a float column already displays like that:

echo '[{"foo": 1.0, "bar": 1}, {"foo": 2, "bar": 2}]' | sqlite-utils insert /tmp/db.db t -

[simonw]

I'm going to make all integers AND floats show up as #666666.

[simonw]

type-pk is a more accurate name than type-link - since people might assume that type-link refers to columns containing a link or a URL or similar.

[simonw]

Live demo: https://latest.datasette.io/fixtures/sortable

[simonw]

I don't like how the column headers themselves are no longer black in mobile view.

[simonw]

Deployed here: https://covid-19.datasettes.com/covid/economist_excess_deaths - and it helped me spot a bug! The floating point numbers there were being treated as strings: