I said I’d argue for more table syntaxes but didn’t exactly mention why. I’ll try to list them now, in order from most important to least.
- Pipe
- Seems to be the most obvious one that I think we can all agree to have right?
- That being said, bp_, I still think having some more alternate syntaxes (below) in the spec is beneficial, and doesn’t affect backwards compatibility, since we could have those in addition to pipe tables.
- Again, I would like to a see a reason to not include multimarkdown’s colspanning here since it easily allows for horizontal grouping, which is used quite commonly in tables.
- Simple (from pandoc’s markdown)
- Allows for a very simple readable syntax that doesn’t need to resort to pipes. Less powerful, but if that’s all one needs, it’s much easier/faster for them to do simple tables, right?
- Multiline (from pandoc’s markdown again)
- Sort of an extension of the simple syntax which is still very useful due to allowing multiple lines in a cell, unlike in any other syntax (except for grid tables, which I refer to below).
- For example, using lists in a table cell is common.
- The syntax also looks very similar to what’s commonly used to style tables in academia. (No vertical lines that pipe tables have).
- CSV
- Pipes look ugly when unaligned being the main reason I think?
- So the same as pipe tables, but with commas instead of pipes?
- But I’m not sure if mofosyne/anyone still wants ‘compact headers’ for comma delimited tables?
- Grid Tables
- Initially I thought that if this makes the spec, emacs users lives would become very easy and therefore it’s worth it.
- However, putting it in the spec means people who don’t use emacs might be presented with such a table, which they might need to edit themselves…
- Since it’s quite difficult to do so without an advanced editor, maybe it shouldn’t be in the spec? Thoughts? (I’m not an emacs user though.)