tarquin wrote: I've started replying to this three times and closed the "Compose" window just as many times. Why? Because I actually have nothing to add, my message could just as well be void, because I have very little more to add. Why I sent it after all? Because I feel exactly the same way, in a strong way, and wanted to get my "vote" counted in. :) Apart from your considerations though, I wanted to clarify the reason why we're asking for this: I hate clogging content and formatting into one ugly mess. I know that also what you're basically advocating against, just wanted to clarify the general concept and the benefits, apart from ease of editing. The source should only contain information (plain text) and meta-information ("this is text regarding disambiguation", "this is text regarding maths", "this is a caption for an image") in some technical way or another, but not formatting per se ("there is a purple box around this text", "this is large text", "this is green underlined text on pink background"--imagine that!). In that regard, XML, proper HTML or at least custom CSS styles could be used for tables as well. Tables are a cross-breed between meta-information and presentation, it's hard to separate the two in this case. What you can do though is properly mark the table header as header and the body as table body, as opposed to marking the first row render in bold on a gray background, and rendering the rest of the table in default style. The former solution is elegant, uniform, allows custom formatting based on purpose (web, personal printing, PDF output, high volume printing, 3rd party importing) whereas the latter is ugly, messy, non-uniform and set in stone formatting-wise. 2c+2c=5c :) [[User:Gutza]]

On Wed, 3 Sep 2003, tarquin wrote: In technical terms, using HTML is a hack; in non-technical terms, HTML is the equivalent of making something work with duct tape, chewing gum or an unbent paperclip. If that's a fair paraphrase, I agree. Actually, after a brief period of ignorance, I've always held that HTML should focus more on presenting the material, not in producing flashy tricks of presentation. (Or so I say now, having abused the <br> tag on a few pages full of lists.) But the problem isn't people like me, it's those folks who discover that you pull off certain tricks by embedding HTML in a Wiki page, then go wild doing just that. The problems of education just keep coming back to haunt us. Geoff