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Sean Conner sean at conman.org
Sat Jan 2 04:55:23 GMT 2021
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It was thus said that the Great Kiëd 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 preformattedblocks 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 tabulardata and *not* for layout purposes. The output uses tabs (HT, or character9) between each field. The <caption> becomes the first line; the <thead>(table header) is followed by a line of dashes; any <tfoot> section willappear at the bottom of the table, again separated by dashes.
I don't bother with any further decorations (like you have) because Idon't feel its necessary (and if a cut-n-paste keeps the tab characters, itbecomes rather easy to manipulate the data).
-spc