I just read through all of these posts. It seems the preferences surrounding the table syntax for CommonMark are as variegated as the Markdown “spec” itself. Some folks want it to be more like HTML, some value the parse over readability in the pure Markdown form, and still others don’t think it should be in the CommonMark spec at all!
@vitaly’s has basically taken the GitHub Flavored Markdown version and incorporated it into markdown-it. (This is what I use for my node.js-powered blog, based on Markdown source.) Most people even remotely interested in Markdown are familiar with GitHub, so this seems like a good choice on @vitaly’s part.
Going one step further, Byword’s implementation of Fletcher Penney’s MultiMarkdown 3 table spec seems the most straight-forward amalgamation of the core ideas for tables in Markdown. Penney’s ideas are a close cousin to the GitHub Flavored Markdown table spec, except for one crucial addition: table captions.
Captions for tables do not seem to appear in any of the other Markdown specs including some table parsing. (And, likewise, no Markdown spec except for Penney’s have any support for <figcaptions>. I’m not sure why.)
Example [Multi]Markdown source for a table:
| First Header | Second Header | Third Header |
| :------------ | :-----------: | -------------------: |
| First row | Data | Very long data entry |
| Second row | **Cell** | *Cell* |
| Third row | Cell that spans across two columns ||
[Table caption, works as a reference][section-mmd-tables-table1]
The final line, [Table caption, works as a reference][section-mmd-tables-table1] is what forms the <caption> for the <table>.
Is this not the most simple execution for tables in CommonMark?