Markdown development

[Seumas Mac Uilleachan]

On 21/03/10 08:28 PM, David E. Wheeler wrote:

> On Mar 21, 2010, at 11:03 AM, Seumas Mac Uilleachan wrote:

>

>    

>> It depends on what you are trying to do. If you want a simple multi-column list of corresponding text such as:

>>

>> Position      Team              P      GD      PTS

>> 1                 Man Utd         31     46      67

>> 2                 Arsenal          31     40       67

>> 3                 Chelsea          29     42      64

>> 4                 Tottenham     30     26      55

>> 5                 Liverpool       31     19       52

>> 6                 Man City        28     17       50

>> 7                 Aston Villa     29     17       50

>> 8                 Everton          30      6       45

>> 9                 Birmingham   30     -3       44

>> 10               Fulham           29      0       38

>> 11               Stoke              30     -6       36

>> 12               Sunderland    30     -6       34

>> 13               Blackburn      29     -17     34

>> 14               Bolton             31     -20     32

>> 15               Wigan             31     -30     31

>> 16               Wolves            30     -24     28

>> 17               West Ham       30     -14     27

>> 18               Burnley           31     -33     24

>> 19               Hull                 30     -35     24

>> 20               Portsmouth    30     -25     13

>>      

> FWIW, that's pretty illegible at whatever tab width my MUA uses.

>

> Best,

>

> David

>

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>    

FWIW it isn't an html-formatted table. I just copied it from a football 
website. It doesn't look very nice in mine either. The spacings got all 
messed up in copying but I wasn't going to take the time to fix it.

The point was that this is a commonly-used table type that there should 
be some standard mechanism for Markdown to deal with (and make it 
legible). There is such a mechanism in PHP Markdown Extra. There is in 
Multimarkdown (similar but different). There probably are in others as 
well (again similar but different). In vanilla Markdown there's html. 
Html as plain text is pretty illegible, much more so than this quick 
mashup table above.

And another problem is fixed vs variable fonts. I tend to use a variable 
font in my MUA (and elsewhere). That makes aligning text with tabs 
virtually impossible.