A Modest Definition List Proposal (David E. Wheeler)

[Michel Fortin]

Le 2009-02-25 à 9:57, Sherwood Botsford a écrit :


>>         id |  name   |  description     |      more info

>>        ====|=========|==================|=====================

>>          6 | Inset   | An inset element | just one element

>>        ----|---------|------------------|---------------------

>>          8 | Stories | Another element  | another element

>>            |         |                  | with 2 lines

>>        ----|---------|------------------|---------------------

>>          9 | Other   | Another element  | another element

>>            |         |                  | with 2 lines

>>        ----|---------|------------------|---------------------

>>          5 | Illust. | An illustration  | line breaks are not

>>            |         | andn I think you | possible in a table

>>            |         | know what I mena.|

>>

>> This is totally unambiguous and easy to scan for the reader. The  

>> problem is

>> that, even though it's easy to read, it's also more tedious to write.

>>

>

> One minor change.  You don't need pipes in the horizontal separator  

> lines.  E.g:

>        id |  name   |  description     |      more info

>        ====================================================


My idea was to follow the way it currently works for tables in PHP  
Markdown Extra, which was made this way to make the difference clearer  
from the header syntax and to allow specifying text alignment for  
columns.
<http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/extra/#table>



> I suspect that if you were going to write a lot of tables, you'd write

> a perl program that would take an existing table that you slopped

> together, and would fix the spacing of pipes on all the lines to match

> the pipe spacing on the first line.


If you're going to write a Perl program for creating Markdown tables,  
why not create tables in HTML directly? It'd be a lot simpler to write  
a converter for that, and it would avoid cluttering the syntax with  
something you need a special program to make anyway.


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