There are two issues:
- A script should be able to easily extract information from the table. I
have worked with the "Cite journal" template of Wikipedia (that is not storing a table). It is relatively easy to extract information from this template by simple regular expressions in Perl. If the information is stored "just in a table" I guess it would be more difficult due to table formatting encoding? A template may be better to separate format and content.
I can't see table syntax being any more difficult to parse than template syntax.
- An instance of the table may have fields that are not defined. In my
DTD XML-file defining the table I have presently 33 fields:
<!ELEMENT Loc (activatedSubjects | brainMapExpId | brainMapLocId | brainMapPaperId | brodmann | comment | coord | ... valueStd | volume | volumeStd | woroi | x | xReported | xStdReported | y | yReported | yStdReported | z | zReported | zStdReported | zScore)*>
A field such as 'brodmann' may or may not be defined for an instance of the table. Seldom are more than 5-10 fields/columns defined. The table would be too broad and too empty if all columns/fields are shown.
Ah, now I see the problem. It might be easiest to write a parser hook to handle it all.