The Date Object would indeed come into play, but the bigger question is how he'll access the "dates" that are in his table. There needs to be a corresponding Date Object for those, or a method to access those via the DOM and move them into a Date Object, before any comparsion could be done.

That's why I pointed toward the server-side solution. My guess is that this is a dynamic, program-generated page, and as such, rather than load the page with JavaScript Date Objects to do client-side, after-the-fact date recognition, he should simply do it server-side while building the page.