Any news re tables and Markdown?

[Chris Purcell]

>>> You can't make a nice-looking table in plain text using proportional
>>> typefaces.
>>
>> Tab characters.
>
> That's not guaranteed to make things line up in a plain text
> document, though. It could in a word processing document, where you
> can set tab stops, but not in a plain text document where a tab is
> presumed to be so many spaces wide.
>
> For example, this:
>
>     iiii    foo
>     mmmm    bar
>
> (where "foo" and "bar" should be preceded by one tab each), will
> look very different depending on whether you're looking at it in a
> proportional or monospaced typeface.

A valid syntax that lets one make a nice-looking table in whatever font 
one edits in is to use *groups* of tabs as the field separator, and a 
tab indent to start. For instance, the following looks good in my 
editor:

	Long, Long Heading One		Long, Long Heading Two
	-----------------------------------	-----------------------------------
	Entry					Entry

It won't look as good to other editors, unless they have very similar 
setups, but it at least lets proportional-font users make tables. On my 
e-mail client, the alternatives so far proposed are entirely unreadable.

If we're going to ditch the goal of republishing raw Markdown outside 
of <code> blocks, we might as well choose a syntax that doesn't rely on 
character-counting.

Chris