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