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fletcher / peg-multimarkdown

An implementation of MultiMarkdown in C, using a PEG grammar - a fork of jgm's peg-markdown. No longer under active development - see MMD 5.
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table improvement? #56

Closed eusebe closed 13 years ago

eusebe commented 13 years ago

Hi,

mmd 3 is just a great tool, thank you for all this work. I was doing some research on google and I found this proposal: http://www.justatheory.com/computers/markup/markdown-table-rfc.html

I think there are good stuff in it, particularly (at least for me) the "use of the colon to indicate continued lines".

Have you considered extending the syntax of the tables to allow row spanning?

Thank you again.

david

c00kiemon5ter commented 13 years ago

that seems nice :) I'd like that too.

fletcher commented 13 years ago

I've commented at length on this elsewhere.

I have yet to see a good table syntax that meets the following criteria:

  1. Looks like something a human would write on their own if not formatting for a computer
  2. unambiguous to parse by computer
  3. easy to write by hand
  4. looks reasonably good whether in fixed width or proportional font (this one's a bit tricky though)

The proposal you reference has been around for quite a while, and to my knowledge no one has implemented it.

MMD tables are pretty good as they are. I'm sure they could be better, but I have yet to see a compelling syntax. When someone comes up with such a syntax, I suspect all the Markdown derivatives with table support will switch. But that's a pretty high bar, and I suspect we'll be waiting a long time.

The truth is that at some point, you have to break down and use raw HTML or LaTeX for non-simple tables.

The way to see this implemented is to come up with a great syntax, and get support from the MD community at large. Then I will consider it.

F-