What to do about Alignment?
Well the other alternative approach is to simply say that you cannot use : to align in PSV (Or just get the parser to recognize but ignore it). After all, the PSV format would be mostly a data interchange format. Oh and btw CSV doesn’t do alignment.
How is external list and comments treated?
On external paragraphs and lists. If you seen my example above, I think it would be mostly treated as comments. It really should not be rendered as a cell, but rather as a “comment display” (think help file) next to a spreadsheet that would look like:
# Dog Company
Below is all kinds of sheets related to dog company
## Product List
Here is a range of products
* ID : Product ID
* Name : Product Name
* Price : Product cost to consumer
[DISPLAY SHEET]
## Payroll
Here is the payroll
* ID : Employee ID
* Name : Full name of employee
* Wage : How much to pay employee
[DISPLAY SHEET]
## Expenses
Here is the Expenses
* ID : Expense ID
* Comment : Expense Comment
* Cost : How much did it cost?
[DISPLAY SHEET]
Where clicking on “DISPLAY SHEET” would switch the currently displayed sheet to the selected display sheet. Alternatively switching worksheet would jump to the relevant comment. What I envision people would put into the comments is field descriptions.
But in most cases, the comments are ignored by the table parser (if we are only interested in the data in say “payroll worksheet”.
But… maybe we could add extra capabilities like “where is the key field”. Does add more complexity tho.