Proposed table specification (long!)

Waylan Limberg
Tue, 10 May 2011 13:26:38 -0000

On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 8:31 AM, Simon Bull <waysoftheearth at
yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> Gentlefolk,
>
> I have been thinking on Markdown's lack of "proper" table
support for a long
> while now.? Here's where I have arrived...
>
>
> ## I Don't Like HTML Tables
>
> It is often argued that embedded HTML is the way to markdown rich tables.
>
> Unfortunately, this contradicts the higher markdown ideal that a raw
> markdown document (including tables!) should be good
>
> 1. Firstly for readers,
> 2. Secondly for authors,
> 3. Lastly for parsers which don't even rate a mention because markdown
is
> for Humans.
>

In response to this I will quote the paragraph from the syntax rules
[1] which likely gave you this impression:

> Markdown is not a replacement for HTML, or even close to it. Its syntax is
very
> small, corresponding only to a very small subset of HTML tags. The idea is
not
> to create a syntax that makes it easier to insert HTML tags. In my opinion,
HTML
> tags are already easy to insert. The idea for Markdown is to make it easy
to read,
> write, and edit prose. HTML is a publishing format; Markdown is a writing
format.
> Thus, Markdown?s formatting syntax only addresses issues that can be
conveyed
> in plain text.

Note that is says "easy to read, write, and edit prose" --
"prose" not
tabular data. Taking this (along with the rest of that section of the
document, it is clear (to me at least) that there is no place for a
table syntax in markdown. Now, if you want to implement a third party
add-on, fine. And if that third party add-on becomes popular, then
maybe others will add it to there implementations as well. Maybe,
eventually, if a single format becomes popular enough, the community
at large will accept it. Until then, I'm not interested. If you want
it, go build it!

[1]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html

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Waylan Limberg