Tables

[Dr. Drang]

On 12/2/05, John Gruber <gruber at fedora.net> wrote:

> I can't see the advantage to adding this sort of "line noise"

> complexity to Markdown's table rules when you can get the same

> effect using regular right-justification and zero-padding the

> numbers:

>

>     Multiply  |   by     | to get

>     ----------|----------|---------

>     ft        |   0.3048 | m

>     mph       |   0.4470 | m/s

>     in        |  25.4000 | mm

>     hp        | 745.7000 | W

>

>

> You can say, "Well, I don't want to add those zeroes", but my answer

> would be "Then just right raw HTML". I think anything other than

> left/right/center alignment is needless complexity for Markdown.


Well, it's not that I don't want to add the zeros, it would be *wrong*
to add them. They indicate more significant digits than is warranted.

More to the point, if you want to use spacing in the body of the table
to indicate alignment, then any alignment other than left, right, and
(less-obviously) center is off-limits.

There's no question that in monospaced ASCII, one would simply use a
line of hyphens and pipes (or, more commonly, pluses) as the
separator. But one also had the freedom to space out a column of
numbers to get the decimal points (or colons or slashes) to line up. I
think that keeping this freedom is worth adding a bit of cruft to the
separator.

(By the way, I'm reading this thread in GMail, which uses a
proportional font. All the tables look awful.)

--
Dr. Drang