Both the ease in writing / reading the non-parsed table and the ease in implementing the parser are important if we are to *build* reliable tools and then *use* them. PHP Markdown Extra actually does a reliable work, and to me, the only change I would welcome to it is the capabi- lity to parse multi-row and multi-column cells. BTW I mentioned I still used Michel Fortin's PMExtra for the tables, and I just discovered Waylan's Python- Markdown 2, which I'll try asap. Benoit