I have produced a data table. All the columns are sortable. It has a date in one column which I formatted dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm:ss . This is different from the default format as defined in the doco, but I should be able to define my own format for non-american formats. (See below)

The DataTable class provides a set of built-in static functions to format certain well-known types of data. In your Column definition, if you set a Column's formatter to YAHOO.widget.DataTable.formatDate, that function will render data of type Date with the default syntax of "MM/DD/YYYY". If you would like to bypass a built-in formatter in favor of your own, you can point a Column's formatter to a custom function that you define.

The table is generated from HTML Markup, so the data is held within "" tags.

This gives me some more clues about compatible string dates for javascript:

In general, the RecordSet expects to hold data in native JavaScript types. For instance, a date is expected to be a JavaScript Date instance, not a string like "4/26/2005" in order to sort properly. Converting data types as data comes into your RecordSet is enabled through the parser property in the fields array of your DataSource's responseSchema

I suspect that the I'm missing something in the date format. So what is an acceptable string date for javascript, that Yui dataTable will recognise, given that I want format it as "dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm:ss" ?