Proposed table specification (long!)

[Thomas Humiston]

Notes from a writer who makes occasional light use of Markdown and is  
not involved in implementations at all (nor especially familiar with  
other -down table syntaxes):

I view my plain-text emails in a proportional font (Verdana). Simon's  
tables look ragged that way, but readable and not terribly unpleasant.

Such decoding of occasional monospace-intended bits is, in my view, a  
fairly conventional matter in email, and thus congruent with  
Markdown's inspiration. Perhaps the matter of mono vs. proportional is  
not such a bugbear after all, at least for small-to-medium tables (and  
for the rest, there's always HTML).

But wait -- Given 2.1.b's handling of empty cells, it seems the  
proposal still assumes some degree of monospace involvement.  
Similarly, 3.1.a speaks of omitting a space-denoted column break from  
"between" two columns, a break that is "between" in a sense (either  
visual or numeric) that's likely obvious in monospace only.

So in the proposal, colspans do depend on character counts, and thus  
on monospace writing tools (except in tables simple enough for manual  
counting). Well, I suppose most authors of Markdown texts use such  
tools anyway.

A confusing bit for me: Section 2.3.b leaves me thinking that the  
compact form is usable only for single-row bodies, and NOT for, say,  
"three rows and three columns" as indicated in Section 1.1. Also, I'd  
suggest instructing authors to use "blank lines" as Gruber does  
instead of "line breaks" (as the latter connotes carriage returns and/ 
or newline characters).

- TH


Simon Bull wrote:


> ~~~~~

>

>

>    -----------------------------------

>         THE PEOPLE OF MIDDLE-EARTH

>    -----------------------------------

>

>      People    Homeland    Tongue

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

>      Elves     Rivendell,  Quenya,

>                Mirkwood,   Sindarin,

>                Lorien      Nandorin

>

>      Dwarves   Erebor      Khuzdul

>

>      Hobbits   The Shire,  Westron

>                Breeland

>

>

> ~~~~~

>