Notes from a writer who makes occasional light use of Markdown and is
not involved in implementations at all (nor especially familiar with
other -down table syntaxes):
I view my plain-text emails in a proportional font (Verdana). Simon's
tables look ragged that way, but readable and not terribly unpleasant.
Such decoding of occasional monospace-intended bits is, in my view, a
fairly conventional matter in email, and thus congruent with
Markdown's inspiration. Perhaps the matter of mono vs. proportional is
not such a bugbear after all, at least for small-to-medium tables (and
for the rest, there's always HTML).
But wait -- Given 2.1.b's handling of empty cells, it seems the
proposal still assumes some degree of monospace involvement.
Similarly, 3.1.a speaks of omitting a space-denoted column break from
"between" two columns, a break that is "between" in a sense (either
visual or numeric) that's likely obvious in monospace only.
So in the proposal, colspans do depend on character counts, and thus
on monospace writing tools (except in tables simple enough for manual
counting). Well, I suppose most authors of Markdown texts use such
tools anyway.
A confusing bit for me: Section 2.3.b leaves me thinking that the
compact form is usable only for single-row bodies, and NOT for, say,
"three rows and three columns" as indicated in Section 1.1. Also, I'd
suggest instructing authors to use "blank lines" as Gruber does
instead of "line breaks" (as the latter connotes carriage returns and/
or newline characters).
- TH
Simon Bull wrote:
~~~~~
-----------------------------------
THE PEOPLE OF MIDDLE-EARTH
-----------------------------------
People Homeland Tongue
===================================
Elves Rivendell, Quenya,
Mirkwood, Sindarin,
Lorien Nandorin
Dwarves Erebor Khuzdul
Hobbits The Shire, Westron
Breeland
~~~~~
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