Yep, table views, collection views, stack views, etc under both iOS and OS X have been doing this for ages now. A bonus of this setup is that it forces you to separate your data source from your view, doing sorts and filters and whatnot independent of the table view. It keeps things neat and clean.
I’m not a web guy but most sorting table implementations on the web I’ve seen do the opposite, instead treating the table contents as the data to be manipulated. While this works it’ll cause you trouble in the long run and if nothing else will negatively impact performance. With the cell reuse model, you instead perform your transformations on the original data (free of markup gunk) and ask the table view to update itself to match the data source. Under iOS, this is done through UITableView’s reloadData method. You never directly interact with the table view’s recycling functions.
I’m not a web guy but most sorting table implementations on the web I’ve seen do the opposite, instead treating the table contents as the data to be manipulated. While this works it’ll cause you trouble in the long run and if nothing else will negatively impact performance. With the cell reuse model, you instead perform your transformations on the original data (free of markup gunk) and ask the table view to update itself to match the data source. Under iOS, this is done through UITableView’s reloadData method. You never directly interact with the table view’s recycling functions.