Tables in pure Markdown

I agree with you that pipe tables aren’t very good for big tables. I still think they should be standardized; pipe tables are such a widely-supported Markdown extension that people expect them to work whether they’re in the spec or not.

On the other hand, I think you’re unfairly characterizing HTML tables. You don’t have to put in the end tags for rows or cells. This is fine (at least, it’s specified by HTML5 to work the way we want it to):

<table>
<tr>
<th> Server
<th> IP
<th> Description
<tr>
<td> cl1
<td> 192.168.100.1
<td> This is my first server in the list
<tr>
<td> cl2
<td> 10.10.1.22
<td> This is another one server
<tr>
<td> windows-5BSD567DSLOS
<td> 127.0.0.12
<td> This is customer windows vm. dont touch this!
<tr>
<td> DFHSDDFFUCKENLONGNAME
<td> 192.168.1.50
<td> Some printer
..
</table>

I guess that MediaWiki tables are better. I’m not convinced that they’re so much better that CommonMark should add them to the spec when they’re so rare among existing implementations.

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