Any news re tables and Markdown?

[Brian Forte]

Gentlefolk,

I'm in the midst of (finally) overhauling both my web-site and my 
publishing goals and have settled on Movable Type as my 
publishing/site-management tool and Markdown as the ur-text format.

Markdown's primary attraction, for me at least, is the attention John 
has given to making 'Markdown-formatted document[s]... publishable 
as-is, as plain text.'

Taking a whole stack of articles and essays (mostly marked-up in HTML 
3.2 but also plain text, Word files, AppleWorks files, even MacWrite 
Pro and WordPerfect files) and turning them into structured text 
files has turned me into a real fan of Markdown, not just as a 
writer's tool but as a storage format.

I love that the ur-text copies of my work are human readable without 
needing transformation by an intermediate process while still 
containing meta-data enough to be auto-transformed into print-worthy 
(or laser-print-worthy, at least) copy.

Going through my extant material, however, I've been taken aback by 
how often I use tables. And not for HTML 3.2-style layout, but for 
presenting tabulated information.

Leaving all my table-specific HTML markup in the other-wise 
Marked-down (to neologise) material works a treat but it does 
undercut the goal of such files being 'publishable as-is, as plain 
text.'

In late-October last year there was a short thread regarding tables 
and Markdown, in which John wrote:

>I do think some sort of table support could fit in very well with 
>Markdown's existing syntax and style, and I think it could be 
>useful. The problem is that HTML tables can be extraordinarily 
>complicated; the challenge will be do devise a syntax for Markdown 
>that remains as simple as possible but still useful for most 
>purposes.

Without discounting the challenge inherent in the 2nd sentence quoted 
above, I was wondering if there might be any news to report on this 
front?

TIA.

Regards,

Brian Forte.
-- 
Brian Forte, <mailto:bforte at betweenborders.com>
Writer, editor, scripter, dangerous mind.