Any news re tables and Markdown?

[Brian Forte]

Michel,

>The second one use `|` as a column separator. A 
>multiple-line-per-row table looks like this:
>
>	Header 1    |  Header 2
>	============+============
>	Cell 1      |  Two-line
>	            |  cell 2.
>	------------+------------
>	Cell 3      |  Cell 4
>
>Single-line-per-row table:
>
>	Header 1    |  Header 2
>	------------+----------
>	Cell 1      |  Cell 2
>	Cell 3      |  Cell 4

These examples are essentially identical to the ASCII tables I create 
in e-mails so they get my 'I can generate these without thinking' 
vote.

One instant thought: could the relationship between the pipe and 
characters within a cell or header be a viable mechanism for 
establishing justification of data within a said cell or header?

For example

	|Header 1    |  Header 2|
	|============+==========+
	|Cell 1      |  Two-line|
	|            |   cell 2.|
	|------------+----------+
	|Cell 3      |    Cell 4|

could produce

	<table>
	<tr><th>Header 1</th><th align="right">Header 2</th></tr>
	<tr><td>Cell 1.</td><td align="right">Two line cell 2.</td></tr>
	<tr><td>Cell 3.</td><td align="right">Cell 4.</td></tr>
	</table>

Useful for presenting tables of values, amongst other things.

>Drawbacks:
>
>*	More characters to write and less clean. (Try writing a somewhat
>	big table with this to see how much clutter it is.)

FWIW, Email Effects is an excellent shareware tool for Mac OS, Mac OS 
X and Windows that makes creating large ASCII tables very easy. See 
<http://sigsoftware.com/emaileffects/> for more info.

This isn't an argument in favour of the 'cluttered' approach, as 
such. Email Effects is proprietary software and hasn't been updated 
for some years.

OTOH, it is still available, does make the job of creating ASCII 
tables remarkably simple, and runs fine on both XP SP2 and OS X 
10.3.8. (Hmm, maybe Gideon Greenspan can be convinced to update Email 
Effects and turn it into a Markdown-formatter?)

All questions of clutter and ease-of-writing aside, I think ASCII 
tables with the pipe character as a column separator are easier to 
*read* (especially big tables, however difficult they are to write) 
which fits nicely with Markdown's 'overriding design goal'.

Regards,

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