[pmwiki-users] Advanced tables - (:caption <attributes>:) xxxxxxxxxxx

[Jean DEMARTINI]

Patrick R. Michaud a écrit :

>On Wed, Jan 11, 2006 at 07:25:03PM +0100, Jean DEMARTINI wrote:
>  
>
>>After playing with simple tables and the possibility to define a 
>>caption, it was necessary to switch to advanced tables and then I begin 
>>to believe that it could be great to define an advanced table like this:
>>
>>(:table <attributes>:)
>>(:caption <attributes>:) blah blah blah
>>(:cellnr <attributes>:) xxxx
>>...
>>(:tableend:)
>>
>>I have tried to modify the cells function but as it is an in-core 
>>modification I fear some nasty interferences, then I prefer to launch a 
>>request.
>>    
>>
>
>I think we can add (:caption:), although I think it ought to be 
>(:tablecaption:) in case we end up with other types of captions.
>  
>
Yes, a very good reason.

>I also had a very good conversation with John Bittner last week, 
>and he's proposed a third table syntax, such that single brackets
>at the beginning of lines indicate new cells -- thus
>
>    (:cellnr class=red:)foo
>    (:cell class=blue:)bar
>    (:cell:)baz
>    (:cellnr:)bash
>
>becomes something like
>
>    --------------
>    [red ]foo
>    [blue]bar
>    [    ]baz
>    --------------
>    [    ]bash
>
>I'm not fond of using the square brackets for this (I think it
>can be too easily confused with links, or might occur in normal
>text), but it does occur to me that it might be nice to have an
>easy way to extend the simple table syntax so that tables
>can be easily written across multiple markup lines but still
>retain the shorter markup offerred by SimpleTables.
>
>Pm
>  
>
I'm not sure that a new intermediate syntax will be very useful. 
Practically there is two cases:
- one needs a quick table with a global layout and the simple table is 
enough,
- one need a more flexible table (each cell needs specific attributes, 
not only color) and an advanced table is quite usable. In fact even 
advance table is a little too restrictive wrt what is permitted using HTML.

A question: I have not trieed colspan and rowspan. Are these attributes 
supported ?

In the same path, a (:cellnh:) could be usefull too. The other HTML tags 
(tbody, thead, tfoot ...)are no well supported by typical browsers and 
add them is probably not usefull.

Regards,
JDem