(Andrew Smith ams80@cam.ac.uk): I think somewhere on meta someone suggested including tables in the same way that we include images. I think this is quite a good idea as some articles with tables in look like a complete mess in edit windows, just having [[table:some table]] or something might make them look a little cleaner. I just thought I should re-mention this while there was discussion of syntax. I don't know the ins and outs of designing this kind of thing so maybe there's many a good reason for not doing this but I just thought I should mention it.
That was certainly one way to do it, but unless we have a new syntax, that just moves the difficultly around without solving it. Sure, it makes the enclosing page simpler, but you still need to code the table itself, and if newbies can't do that, they can't really participate any more than they do now with complex tables that just get left alone.
I think a simplification of MoinMoin syntax will do us just fine:
||| Table | col1 | col2 | col2
Gets rendered as a table with two rows, the first having a single cell spanning three columns, and the second having three cells.
We can eliminate the MoinMoin syntax for centering and justifying cells because that can be done more simply with the unified style syntax. I don't see any reason to need rowspans--I can live without them. We might want to do something to distinguish table heading cells from regular data cells; I'm thinking using the "=" symbol so that it's consistent with text headings.