before the issue of tables drifts away entirely...

[Bowerbird at aol.com]

before the issue of tables drifts away entirely...

for what it's worth, here's input on
tables from my "zen markup language",
another form of non-markup markup.

1.  i consider 3-or-more contiguous spaces as a separator.  use any font.
2.  i consider tabs to be separators too.  makes it easier for some users.
3.  a block of lines all with the same indentation?  a one-column table.
4.  i created rules to handle cell justification.  seem to work pretty well.
5.  i consider a lone period to be a cell placeholder.  and make it invisible.
6.  i consider a lone-period line to be a request for ruler lines.  kaboom.
7.  i make users line-break multiple-line tables into one-line ones.  ok.

that's off the top of my head, from memory.  there might be some more.

at display-time, my viewer-program formats the table on-the-fly,
making it look as good as possible under the current circumstances
e.g., window-width, user-selected font and font-size, and so on...

-bowerbird