A Modest Definition List Proposal (David E. Wheeler)

[Dr. Drang]

I had nothing to say about definition lists (remember when that was  
the topic?), but now that we've moved on to tables and the relative  
merits of proportional and monospace fonts, I do have some opinions:

1. Regular Markdown--by which I mean Gruber's Markdown.pl--looks  
good[^1] regardless of whether you're using proportional or monospaced  
fonts. I can't think of any construct in which the width of the  
characters makes a difference.

2. Plain text tables almost always look like crap *unless* you're  
using a monospaced font, because columns always include a mixture of  
visible characters and spaces. I suspect this is one of the reasons  
Gruber hasn't put tables into Markdown.pl.

3. Markdown was not intended to cover every situation; it's meant to  
be a simple, readable substitute for simple (X)HTML. In this spirit,  
we shouldn't expect table additions to Markdown to be able to handle  
every type of table, just the simpler types. I like the table syntax  
of PHP Markdown Extra and MultiMarkdown for this reason.

4. Using a script[^2] to align the pipes of a plain text table is very  
practical if you're writing in a monospaced font. You can write and  
edit the table quickly without regard to alignment, then make it  
readable by applying the script to it. It's much easier to make tables  
this way than to type them out in HTML.

--
Dr. Drang
drdrang at gmail.com

[^1]: I wish it wouldn't wrap single-paragraph list items in <p> tags  
when you separate the items with blank lines (as I've done here),  
because it encourages the user to smush the list items together to  
avoid the <p>s. Lists with longer items look better with some air  
between them.

[^2]: Like the fine script you'll find at [my blog][1].

[1]: http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2008/08/tables-for-markdown-and-textmate/