It was thus said that the Great Ki?d Llaentenn once stated: > Hello, > > Just recently I was creating a Gemini mirror of an HTTP site, and came > across several pages that made heavy use of tables. I did what I suspect > most Gemini publishers/content authors do: use ASCII tables, like so: > > +--------------------------------+-------+ > | Food | Price | > +--------------------------------+-------+ > | Eggs | $2 | > | Eggs and spam | $4 | > | Eggs, spam, eggs and spam | $8 | > | Spam spam baked beans and spam | $8 | > | Just spam | $2 | > +--------------------------------+-------+ > > There are several problems with this approach, though: > > 1. It requires the client to display the table in a monospaced font, > which many would prefer not to use. > 2. Text in table rows won't be wrapped properly on narrow displays. > 3. ASCII tables are anything but screenreader friendly, since there's no > semantic information about the table's structure. > 4. It mixes information and presentation, which is against the spirit of > Gemini(?) > > So, are there any other options for having tables in Gemtext, other than > adding a new syntax to the spec? I'm hard pressed to think of another > solution. There's not much choice you have in this matter. I use preformatted blocks for HTML tables, you can see two examples of which here: gemini://gemini.conman.org/boston/2020/12/28.1 The format I use works because I only use HTML tables for actual tabular data and *not* for layout purposes. The output uses tabs (HT, or character 9) between each field. The <caption> becomes the first line; the <thead> (table header) is followed by a line of dashes; any <tfoot> section will appear at the bottom of the table, again separated by dashes. I don't bother with any further decorations (like you have) because I don't feel its necessary (and if a cut-n-paste keeps the tab characters, it becomes rather easy to manipulate the data). -spc
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