[Wikipedia-l] What a wiki table syntax needs to do to work with current table layouts

[Daniel Mayer]

JeLuF wrote:

>One of the tables I like in wikipedia is this one:
>http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Beryllium
>
>I think this is a very apropriate way to present the
information,
>some kind of fact sheet. tarquin's proposal needs to
get some
>kind of markup to mark the labels (which are then
rastered with
>background color according to selected skin).

Thank you. Although I think that particular
implementation is a bit fat -- it takes up nearly half
of the text area on low res screens. I am in fact far
more proud of the taxonomy tables that I helped
develop -- which use nested tables with invisible
borders, have embedded images, heading fill color and
a list in the final cell to make adding taxon group
members easy
(see: http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Typical_owl for an
example)

But here is the rub; any wiki syntax that is enacted
will need to have nested tables, the ability to have
embedded images, lists and heading color fill or I
won't be able to use or promote them for the element
articles, taxonomy tables or even the country tables
(I'm involved with all three projects and considering
helping with the US Presidents tables). The colors for
the elements and taxonomy tables have specific
meanings associated with them and the nested tables
are needed to present different types of information
(I guess this can be replicated without nesting, but
in HTML at least that requires a /more/ complicated
table). 
In my view then, the goal of any wiki table mark-up
should be to recreate the typical owl table in the
most easy to learn and code wiki markup possible. The
details on how to do this are not as important to me
as the results. 

--mav


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