sherwood said: > I don't understand. what's to understand? :+)
> Are you saying that MD should recognize elastic tab stops > in a file and convert that to a html table? yes, that's what i'm saying, or at least part of it. > This is certainly a possible route, but given > the number of editors that don't recognize > elastic tab stops, this is daunting. at some point, you have to free yourself from the constraints that low-quality software imposes on your workflow, yes sir... but, you know, all it takes is for one brave leader to _lead_, and a number of non-cowardly followers to _follow_, and -- before you know it -- a new capability is taken for granted. > It also means that MD needs to recognize > at least two ways to do tables -- ets and markup. well, if you want to keep a horse around in addition to your new horseless carriage, by all means, feel free... ;+) > Are you saying that browsers should all be smart enough > to recognize elastic tab stops? yes. every text-editing environment should have the capability. because -- if you've programmed it, like i have -- you'll know that it's really not all that difficult to code. indeed, it's easy... and although i don't remember this in the work-up on them (because i conceived them long before that, independently), this functionality should include a feature that will convert multiple spaces to a tab character (the easy part) as well as convert a tab to the "correct" number of multiple spaces... (e.g., so the table displays correctly in a monospaced font). i'd think the default save-format would be multiple-spaces, just to accommodate the non-tab-aware software out there. there's nothing "magical" about this functionality. it's just a straightforward implementation of old-fashioned tabs, with the new wrinkle that the columns are self-adjusting to the size they need to be. which is something we could have reasonably expected our computers to do all along... (indeed, isn't this capability already in most spreadsheets?) > While an admirable goal, I won't hold my breath for the day > that 95% of browsing is done with ETS capable browsers. i'm not holding my breath for 95% of browsers being _capable_, in _any_ sense of the word, not as long as we have a microsoft... but in cost-benefit terms, cost being low, benefits being high, this particular feature is one that has a good cost-benefit ratio. all it will take is for somebody out front to "just do it"... this is _not_ a betamax/vhs situation. vhs was "good enough". nobody says our current table functionality is "good enough". -bowerbird
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