Markdown development

Seumas Mac Uilleachan seumas at idirect.ca
Mon Mar 22 22:19:04 EDT 2010


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.


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