markupless tables

[John Gruber]

Aaron Swartz <me at aaronsw.com> wrote on 12/9/05 at 8:34 PM:


> We could treat tabs as moving to the next tab stop, since that's how

> many things display them and also it's quite convenient for this

> application.


Up until now Markdown has never done anything with tabs that
couldn't be done with spaces. In fact, in the Perl and PHP
implementations, the first step is to convert all tabs to spaces.
I think your proposal is too magic.

Plus, in your specific example:

    Travis Fast        9
    Bitch | Lab        5
    Yoshie Furuhashi   5
    boddi satva        4

there actually *is* a literal pipe, which seems to me would be
confusing as hell assuming pipes are the cell separator for most
tables.

Tables are plainer and in many simple cases more natural without
pipes, but the pipes make it unambiguous that you're creating a
table.

On the other hand, we could perhaps allow something like:


| Travis Fast        9

| Bitch or Lab       5

| Yoshie Furuhashi   5

| boddi satva        4


I.e., we'd be using `|` as a line prefix for tables similar to the
way `>` is used for blockquotes. And cells could be separated by two
or more spaces.

Regarless, you'll need to escape a literal pipe in a table, I think:


| Travis Fast      |  9

| Bitch \| Lab     |  5

| Yoshie Furuhashi |  5

| boddi satva      |  4


-J.G.