Tables

[Dr. Drang]

I'm late to this thread, but I'd like to add a some comments:

* Although I use monospaced fonts when writing Markdown, not everyone
   does or (in the case of a wiki administered by someone else) can.
   Using alignment in the input to indicate alignment in the output will
   be difficult for people using proportional fonts. I note that  
alignment
   of the text inside the hanging bullet is not required for list input,
   even though that's the way the text is aligned in the output.

   In short, I'm in favor of keeping the colons to indicate cell  
alignment.

* In fact, I'd like to see the cell alignment extended to include  
decimal
   alignment. Thus

   Multiply  |   by     | to get
   ----------|.---------|---------
    ft       |   0.3048 | m
    mph      |   0.447  | m/s
    in       |  25.4    | mm
    hp       | 745.7    | W

   would align the middle column on the decimal point using a
   <col align="char"> tag. As with the colon, the period tucked in the
   line of dashes seems unobtrusive to me.

   I've made this change to my copy of Fletcher Penney's  
MultiMarkDown and
   it seems to work well. (Fletcher: I'll email you the diff later  
today.)


--
Dr. Drang