tablesorter fails to work in a table using colspan

tablesorter fails to work in a table using colspan

I have simple HTML tables built with JSP, I wanted to sort them with tablesorter. It worked fine on some tables (I have several different pages) but not on others (after I added a theme; the doc fails to tell that a theme is mandatory, I supposed a default one was used otherwise).

After investigation, I found out that the tables it fails on had a <th colspan="2"> (or 3, etc.) on them.
FYI, it was a "Actions" header over several columns, each one having a button for a given action.

I solved that by making one column and simulating the sub-columns with <ul> (<li> being inline-block) and I could also have made several columns, but I find this (undocumented) restriction to be annoying (and puzzling).

Can tablesorter be improved to handle gracefully these multi-span columns? Of course, sorting would be deactivated on them.

Thanks for this useful plug-in, very well made.