Themeing support for table alternative

Well what I did is not clean enough to supply as a patch. My work does not rewrite the function properly, but rather tacks on an extra bit at the end of the func instead of theme('table'...

  $itemlist = array();
  foreach ((array)$rows as $item) {
    $itemlist[] = $item['data'][0]['data'];
  }

  return theme('item_list', $itemlist);

But it gives you an idea of what I was trying to do. Simply to have each cell as a list item, without the rows/cols structure of tables.

A good solution would be to create a function that simply builds an array of data (not in rows and cols) and then hands it off to a theme function which then arranges rows based on settings and calls theme_table, and themers could alternatively provide a theme that calls theme_item_list.

However my code does not take into account hierarchy handling or anything like that, which is further reason that I should not be the one to write a patch that can cleanly apply to everybody's use case.

I guess the core issue for me is that when I downloaded this module I was never expecting it to give table output (esp. considering the name of the module). Then to my surprise that was the only options. Table output is very difficult to style. In this particular case I have to layout my category list in a "U" shape (I'm not kidding) which is possible by overriding theme_item_list() with some extra classes based on the count of items, etc... but with a table it is very difficult to move cells out of the 'grid' layout they are fused in to.