Am Montag, 15. September 2003 15:51 schrieb Magnus Manske:
OK, anyone opposed to
- wiki table markup *in general*
- the *markup style* I use at test.wikipedia.org
- my *implementation* of that style
please speak up now! Otherwise, I'll commit it to the stable branch of the software, which means it will go online with the next update.
Ok, just speaking up a little bit, but just repeating what has been said before.
I doubt that a new markup for tables will make things a lot more easier for newbies. Tables *are* a complex thing, and they are difficult to read in any markup language, because cells rendered *beside* the other are coded *below* each other in the source (at least if there is som more content requireing line breaks). So I doubt that a newbie will be able to edit a table like it's used in the country or element articles, no matter what markup we are using.
Therefore I really liked the idea of having a "table"-namespace, and a way of importing the tables in that namespace as easiliy as we do with images right now. The article source would be cleared of the table, and the table might be as complex as needed without scaring away the newbies.
However, I can imagine that the new markup is a fine way for rendering *simple* tables within the article, giving newbies a chance to do simple table layouts the easy way (there are a lot of issues that can be aligned in simple tables, so the feature *is* useful). It's somewhat more readable, easier to understand and therefore easier to write than html.
But, as I said, for large and complex tables that new markup will not solve our problems.
Uli