Any news re tables and Markdown?

[Jelks Cabaniss]

Michel Fortin wrote:
>> * <http://tinyurl.com/44t9d>
>> * <http://tinyurl.com/5tavg>
>> * <http://tinyurl.com/5rgpz>
 
> I admit that many of these tables looks great, but most tables in
> these RFC's cannot be converted so simply. 

Indeed.  And after re-reading my post, I realize it might have come across
as implying that there was a One True Grid Table Style, which is obviously
not the case.  Just as there are tons of emails in the wild that are
*almost* Markdownable, doesn't mean they *are* Markdownable (a common
example: the colon after the square bracket in numeric link references).  My
main point was that in general, the grid **style** has been for some time
the most common table idiom, meme, etc. for expressing unequivocably in
plain text: "THIS is a table".

As an example of a variation (actually, several variations) of the grid
style, see [RFC 1942][].  (This RFC, btw, is the one for HTML Tables by Dave
Raggett, the guy who among other things immortalized `<td>`... :)  That's
the only place I've seen that particular grid style though -- most all
others use the `+` sign to denote cell corners (as in the RFCs above).

[RFC 1942]: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1942.txt

Btw, I suppose that what reStructuredText calls "Simple Tables" could be
defined as "tables with *implied* (missing) cell corners".  IMO, it's that
implicitness that makes Simple Tables paradoxically more complex than Grid
Tables.  Cf. SGML (terse & implicit) vs. XML (verbose, but explicit).
(AFAIK, only *one* complete SGML parser has ever emerged, and SGML was an
ISO standard as of 1986; compare that to the number of complete XML parsers
available within just the first two years of XML becoming a W3C Rec in
1998.)  


/Jelks