tarquin wrote:
The key details are:
- one cell per line (and not one row per line)
- formatting information is seperate from data
These both increase the clarity considerably. Someonoe who jsut wants to edit the data can skip the header line, no matter how ugly and comlicated it may be.
That also decreases the usefulness considerably. One *cell* per line? You couldn't organize data in columns--you couldn't have a piece of information with an explanation immediately beside it of what the information is, the way we have on the U.S. Presidents pages, the countries pages, the various tree of life pages.... You must have meant two, at least?
kq
Since Wiki markup often ignores single \n, my proposal could be modified to *allow* several cells per line. However, I think the following is easily graspable: || | Name | Bill Clinton || | Musical instrument | saxophone ||
It's *long* in raw form, yes. But it's also clean.
|| | Name| Bill Clinton || | Musical instrument | saxophone ||
This is good too, but there's more work involved in finding the limits between data. One could use spaces to set it out nively in raw form -- but then if the data changes the spaces change. It's a bit faffy.
I think my motivation stems on part form the rapidly growing table of phonemes on the SAMPA page.
koyaanisqatsi@nupedia.com wrote:
That also decreases the usefulness considerably. One *cell* per line? You couldn't organize data in columns--you couldn't have a piece of information with an explanation immediately beside it of what the information is, the way we have on the U.S. Presidents pages, the countries pages, the various tree of life pages.... You must have meant two, at least?
kq
On Thu, Aug 01, 2002 at 01:17:11PM +0100, tarquin wrote:
Since Wiki markup often ignores single \n, my proposal could be modified to *allow* several cells per line. However, I think the following is easily graspable: || | Name | Bill Clinton || | Musical instrument | saxophone ||
It's *long* in raw form, yes. But it's also clean.
As I also suggested on the talk page of
http://meta.wikipedia.com/wiki.phtml?title=Wiki_markup_tables
why not something more WYSIWIG, like: * [| starts a table rule * |] ends a table rule * consecutive rules belong to the same table
Like
[| Name || Bill Clinton |] [| Musical instrument || Saxophone |]
-- Jan Hidders
Jan.Hidders wrote
As I also suggested on the talk page of
http://meta.wikipedia.com/wiki.phtml?title=Wiki_markup_tables
why not something more WYSIWIG, like:
- [| starts a table rule
- |] ends a table rule
- consecutive rules belong to the same table
Like
[| Name || Bill Clinton |] [| Musical instrument || Saxophone |]
-- Jan Hidders
I speak as a person who finds tables to be a struggle. (My 12-year old son had it figured out on the first day of a one-week web design course, but that's another story.) In the old days :-) when typewriters were in fashion you could put something in table form by simply using the tab (or tabular) key; an advanced typewriter user would even learn to set tabs. Now, even though word processing programs (perhaps grudgingly) allow this use of the tab, I hesitate in other software because the results are often unpredictable.
In those tab days (even before that name was usurped by a certain soft-drink manufacturer) nobody even considered the possibility of having his data in neat little boxes. The HTML community has made it a serious challenge for the user to get rid of them. If you can't restore the old function of the tab key then I vote for the one line=one row approach as being more intuitive and more WYSIWIG.
The example above gives me cause for concern because it really only has one data set. What will it look like when you add Harry Truman's piano or some other president's fiddle?
I very much believe that with most non-technical users the need for tables of data will be on a very elementary level. A person who wants to fill in a table of presidents and their musical instruments will be quite content to leave the complexities of the periodic table to someone else. Those of us who have contributed to the "List of Novelists" since it has started to become an annotated list would probably find a table format less ragged than what we have now, but a contributor (particularly a newbie) may hesitate to do anything if he finds the code too complicated. Exaggerated mathophobia was once a characteristic of English majors, and I would be surprised if that has changed.
Why can't we just bring back the tab?
Eclecticology
On Thu, Aug 01, 2002 at 10:28:43AM -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Jan.Hidders wrote
Like
[| Name || Bill Clinton |] [| Musical instrument || Saxophone |]
The example above gives me cause for concern because it really only has one data set. What will it look like when you add Harry Truman's piano or some other president's fiddle?
I didn't interpret the example that way, but rather as a table with properties of Bill Clinton. If you want a table of presidents and their favourite instrument you would write this:
[| '''President''' || '''Instrument''' |] [| Bill Clinton || Saxophone |] [| Harry Truman || Piano |] [| Abe Lincoln || Bag pipes |]
WYSIWIG enough? :-)
-- Jan Hidders
On 8/1/02 3:27 PM, "Jan.Hidders" hidders@uia.ua.ac.be wrote:
I didn't interpret the example that way, but rather as a table with properties of Bill Clinton. If you want a table of presidents and their favourite instrument you would write this:
[| '''President''' || '''Instrument''' |] [| Bill Clinton || Saxophone |] [| Harry Truman || Piano |] [| Abe Lincoln || Bag pipes |]
I'm pretty sure Lincoln played the fiddle.
On Thu, Aug 01, 2002 at 03:55:43PM -0400, The Cunctator wrote:
On 8/1/02 3:27 PM, "Jan.Hidders" hidders@uia.ua.ac.be wrote:
I didn't interpret the example that way, but rather as a table with properties of Bill Clinton. If you want a table of presidents and their favourite instrument you would write this:
[| '''President''' || '''Instrument''' |] [| Bill Clinton || Saxophone |] [| Harry Truman || Piano |] [| Abe Lincoln || Bag pipes |]
I'm pretty sure Lincoln played the fiddle.
Oops. You're right. So now it's your turn: Name three Belgian prime ministers and their favourite music instruments. :-) It's also Ok if you name one famous Belgian that invented a music instrument. Without checking Wikipedia first, of course.
-- Jan Hidders
koyaanisqatsi@nupedia.com wrote:
tarquin wrote:
The key details are:
- one cell per line (and not one row per line)
[..]
That also decreases the usefulness considerably. One *cell* per line? You couldn't organize data in columns--you couldn't have a piece of information with an explanation immediately beside it of what the information is, the way we have on the U.S. Presidents pages, the countries pages, the various tree of life pages.... You must have meant two, at least?
That's one cell per line of *markup*.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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