A dialog opens and asks how many rows and columns you want.. etc.. It wouldn't be too hard to make an even better JS table creator. That would be even more newbie friendly than a simply improved syntax.

On 10/5/07, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: Indeed. Syntax improvements and a user friendly tool are not mutually exclusive. If you want to worry about horrible syntax go find any enwp article with an extensive infobox and hit edit at the top of the screen. You get a window full of gobbeldty-gook code.

On 10/5/07, Erik Moeller &lt;erik(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: Well, since I'm responsible for our current table markup, I feel I shoud say something ;-) From the extension page, it seems the major "advantage" of <tab> are: * use of arbitary delimiters, including the tab char * no need for "|-", since every row in the text is a row in the table One thing for editing: I just tried to enter the tab char into a MediaWiki edit box (Firefox, Windows). I didn't succeed. How can I manually edit tab-delimitered text (add tabs) without having to resort to copying or ALT-number stunts? So, if people start copying stuff from their Excel tables, how am I (as the average user) supposed to insert a new column? I thought the major point of this extension was simplicity... That said, how about {| type=simple sep=comma which would enable single-line-is-single-row mode, and use comma as cell delimiter? One could additionally still use style= and class= for the table. The single-line-is-single-row mode is probably easy to implement. But do we really need the different separators? Why is This,Is,How,To do it so much better than This||Is||How||To do it ? Are people really waiting to paste in CSV data, and are they unable to use the replace function in their editor? How many new, useful tables could we get with the comma that we can't get with the double pipe? Cheers, Magnus _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Editing MediaWiki with tables and templates is too complicated for most non-programmer laymen. But that cannot be fixed by simplifying table syntax, since any simplification is only going to make it marginally easier to edit. Instead, some WYSIWYG editor is needed. I'm surprised that Firefox still in 2007 only supports plain text editing of <textarea>.

Well, since I'm responsible for our current table markup, I feel I shoud say something ;-)

I thought the major point of this extension was simplicity...

{| type=simple sep=comma

Yeah, as I said, I don't think the defaults are particularly sane. But if you have <tab> bla|bla|bla </tab> which resolves to a nice table with headings, that would cover a lot of typical uses. Advantages compared to existing syntax: | is already used as a separator e.g. in image syntax, templates, etc. <foo></foo> is already used for nowiki, math, ref, and plenty of parser extensions, not to mention HTML itself.