Any news re tables and Markdown?

[John Gruber]

Michel Fortin <michel.fortin at michelf.com> wrote on 03/12/05 at 8:39am:

> 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

I like this idea.


> If we want to add support for proportional font, we need a column 
> separator. Pipes could be allowed (but not required) like that:
> 
> [...]
> 
> And now there is now an unambiguous way to create a single-column table:
> 
>     | SKU
>     | ---
>     | a1
>     | b1

Actually, I've been considering whether '|' should be required to
precede all lines of a table. The idea being that this would
definitively and clearly mark them as tables.



> (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.)

Tough luck for them, I think. The only way to offer easy or robust
support for those using proportional fonts would be to add some sort
of decoration/tagging characters. Such as:

    This   That
    >>>>   <<<<
      12   12
     123   123
       1   1


And even then things aren't going to line up visually.

I just can't worry too much about table syntax for users of
non-proportional fonts.

-J.G.