Proposed table syntax

[Angie Ahl]

On 20 Oct 2004, at 19:20, Jelks Cabaniss wrote:

> Precedents exist.  See for example [reStructuredText]'s, [Grutatext]'s 
> and
> [TexTile]'s implementations.
>
> [reStructuredText]: http://tinyurl.com/5s7mk#tables
> [Grutatext]: http://www.triptico.com/download/README_grutatxt

That's just *way* too long winded. both for the regex and for a human.
I'd rather write the raw HTML than go through all that. I do write html 
tables by hand quite a bit though, or rather regex them into existence.

> [TexTile]: http://www.textpattern.com/help/?item=table

that one's alright but I prefer the original posted syntax myself.

> Then there's a table with table heads across the top row:
>
> 	First Name		Last Name		URL
> 	==============================================================
> 	Jeffrey			Zeldman			http://www.zeldman.com/
> 	John			Gruber			http://www.daringfireball.net/
> 	Joshua			Davis			http://www.joshuadavis.com/
>


regex wise I'd say a cell separator (</td><td>) should be one or more 
tabs and possibly, more than 1 space( but I can see problems with that.

I wouldn't make it a fixed number of spaces or tabs as people sometimes 
add extra ones to fix layout issues in email etc. like above.

Doing it with 1 or more tabs leads to a problem if there were empty 
cells, you'd need to mark a cell as empty, maybe with something like 
[empty]

Something I'll be putting in my own markup anyway, so even if John 
doesn't go for it you can have my regex when I've done it.

Angie