NOTE: This is the third time today I've sent this email and it still hasn't found its way into the archive. Hopefully this one will get through.

LDC wrote:

There's no provision for nested tables. I don't think

there's a good enough case for their necessity. Cell backgrounds and borders can be done with styles.

Well I and many other very hard-working Wikipedians think there is a very real need for nested tables. They are used in each these converted articles; organisms (that nested table has a border=0), countries, heads of state, elements, and sub-national entities. And this list doesn't include the many other

non-project related nested tables.

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So if http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beryllium cannot be replicated pretty much as-is in wikicode then I for will have a fit (I'm sure many others will join me).

Yeah, that nested table is a nuisance. I'll have to think about that.

There are two nested tables; the obvious one in the isotopes section and the navigation nested table in the first cell of the larger table (which in turn has an image embedded in it). Both are necessary to the functioning of the table and are not a "nuisance" at all.

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An alternative solution is to only allow HTML syntax to be rendered if it is in a table:namespace

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page.

As I said before, I want to eliminate the complexity,

not just move it around. I want newbies to have some chance of being to edit the table as well as the prose around it.

Do you have /any/ idea about how much work would be undone and have to be redone in a diminished format if

the document as is were implemented? Thousands of pages will be broken and many users, including me, may

get fed-up with Wikipedia and leave.

A table is going to be dense and intimidating to nontechnical users no matter what but tables are very useful when it comes to effectively presenting tabular

data (something we have a lot of). Thus putting this complexity on a separate page seems to be a good compromise between preventing newbies from not being intimidated by hordes of markup and allowing more seasoned users the ability to present tabular data in a table.

How the page functions for the reader is just as important as how it functions for the writer. And just

as different writers have different abilities to contribute prose to an article, we have different coders with different abilities to add markup to articles.

We don't dumb down the prose of articles to reach the lowest common denominator reader/writer (except for intro paragraphs) and we should not similarly dumb down the markup just to make things a bit easier for the lowest common denominator coder. Just segregate the tables from the prose and both the markup- phobic and the markup gurus will be happy (that's not to say that I advocate for full HTML support; just move the HTML off of the regular article page and into

its own namespace).

I would still like to know if a conversion script would be run. If not, then disabling HTML would make Wikipedia look badly broken with the displayed text of

tens of thousands of instances of HTML markup. And all

that would have to be re-coded in the new syntax by hand. If it is run then the script is going to mangle any table that has markup in it that is no supported in the proposed wikicode. Either way we are talking about changing masses of content that somebody

is going to have to repair.

Why in the world is it necessary to break so many things and therefore create so much added work? The negative side-effects of the proposed WikiSyntax will cause far more problems than it purports to solve, IMO.

Please replicate in WikiCode the HTML we currently support (well, maybe not the obscure stuff that is hardly ever used) and/or create a table:namespace.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

PS - We've seem to have done fine during the past 2+ years with tolerating HTML where it makes sense (such as tables).