[Wikipedia-l] Table markup

[Gutza]

Ulrich Fuchs wrote:

>Am Montag, 15. September 2003 15:51 schrieb Magnus Manske:
>  
>
>>OK, anyone opposed to
>>- wiki table markup *in general*
>>- the *markup style* I use at test.wikipedia.org
>>- my *implementation* of that style
>>
>>please speak up now! Otherwise, I'll commit it to the stable branch of
>>the software, which means it will go online with the next update.
>>
>>    
>>
>
>Ok, just speaking up a little bit, but just repeating what has been said 
>before.
>
>I doubt that a new markup for tables will make things a lot more easier for 
>newbies. Tables *are* a complex thing, and they are difficult to read in any 
>markup language, because cells rendered *beside* the other are coded *below* 
>each other in the source (at least if there is som more content requireing 
>line breaks). So I doubt that a newbie will be able to edit a table like it's 
>used in the country or element articles, no matter what markup we are using.
>
>Therefore I really liked the idea of having a "table"-namespace, and a way of 
>importing the tables in that namespace as easiliy as we do with images right 
>now. The article source would be cleared of the table, and the table might be 
>as complex as needed without scaring away the newbies.
>
>However, I can imagine that the new markup is a fine way for rendering 
>*simple* tables within the article, giving newbies a chance to do simple 
>table layouts the easy way (there are a lot of issues that can be aligned in 
>simple tables, so the feature *is* useful). It's somewhat more readable, 
>easier to understand and therefore easier to write than html. 
>
>But, as I said, for large and complex tables that new markup will not solve 
>our problems.
>
>Uli
>
Agreed, for large tables it probably wouldn't as it stands. But if your 
worries are the newbies, a table creation tool could be added in 
Wikipedia, which would make things easier with newbies. I do however 
think the new table markup could be useful for newbies because it 
wouldn't require strict stack-like (FIFO) open/close tags which I guess 
are the main drawback of HTML tables; also, with the advent of proper 
table header wiki tags, newbies could easily properly format relatively 
simple tables, without having to go through freakish "<TD 
BGCOLOR='#DDDDDD'>" tags. And finally, being a newbie doesn't equate 
being an idiot, people can learn even if the cells rendered beside one 
another must be coded under one another, that's relatively easy to 
understand, given that people generally read 
left-to-right/top-to-bottom, so it's no change of order, although 
admittedly there is a considerable change in format (I expect there will 
be some support for right-to-left languages as well).

Gutza