Any news re tables and Markdown?

[Michel Fortin]

Le 11 mars 2005, à 1:19, John Gruber a écrit :

> For example, what about alignment? When you do a table like this:
>
>     SKU      Price
>     ---     ------
>     a1      $1,050
>     b1         399
>     b2          99
>
> [...] Markdown could look at the offsets of the items in each row, and 
> if the end offset for each item in a row is at the same column (i.e. 
> character position in the line), then it's right-aligned. But this 
> pretty much means you have to be using a monospaced font to get 
> columns to right-align.

As much as I like the idea of catching alignment by looking at the 
content, I think this is completely unreliable because it requires cell 
content to be of different length. To take your example, what can you 
do if the prices you have looks like below?

     SKU      Price
     ---     ------
     a1      $1,050
     b1      39,902
     b2      99,212

A way to remove the ambiguity is to require the separator line to be 
longer than the header. If it is longer on the right, it's 
left-aligned; if it is longer on the left, it's right-aligned; if it is 
longer than the header on both side then it's center-aligned:

     Left     Right    Center    Default
     -----  -------  ----------  -------
     0110    011010   10010100   01001
     1101    110100   01001011   00111

If the header separator line is the same length than the header, there 
is no align attribute and the browser will use the style sheet's 
default.

(Note: I say the header here, where I could say that the separator line 
must be longer that the entire content. This is because the content can 
be long, and maintaining it's alignment can be error-prone (or you 
could just be lazy). By keeping alignement behaviour linked only to the 
header, I believe that it will cause less trouble, and it's easier to 
change too.)

* * *

If we want to add support for proportional font, we need a column 
separator. Pipes could be allowed (but not required) like that:

     Left  |   Right |   Center   | Default
     ----- | ------- | ---------- | -------
     0110  |  011010 |  10010100  | 01001
     1101  |  110100 |  01001011  | 00111

Pipes are optional on the left and right side of the table:

    | Left  |   Right |   Center   | Default |
    | ----- | ------- | ---------- | ------- |
    | 0110  |  011010 |  10010100  | 01001   |
    | 1101  |  110100 |  01001011  | 00111   |

And now there is now an unambiguous way to create a single-column table:

    | SKU
    | ---
    | a1
    | b1

(Note: there is still something that doesn't work here: alignement. 
With a proportional font, you can't rely on the number of dash to check 
for text alignment inside the column like I proposed above.)


Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://www.michelf.com/