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[users] Tables in Gemtext

Luke Emmet luke at marmaladefoo.com

Sat Jan 2 18:13:45 GMT 2021

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On 02-Jan-2021 03:04, Kiëd Llaentenn wrote:

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.Some other ideas:

If you want to present the information in its original structure, there are other options(as well as trying to inline it into gemtext preformatted text already discussed on this thread):

1. provide link to a CSV2. serialise as simple text3. If you just want to preserve the visual appearance, you could also provide a link to a rendered PDF

For option 2, most tables can be "flattened" in a way that users can usually get the idea of that was there. In my own html2gmi app [1] it has this as an option for processing tables as well as the "preformatted text layout":

⊞ table ⊞

Food PriceEggs $2Eggs and spam $4Eggs, spam, eggs and spam $8Spam spam baked beans and spam $8Just spam $2

Works fine for your table above IMHO. Or you could use some similar variant approach of this.

I grant you this won't help for complex tables, but for those your options are limited apart from option 1 and 3 if you want to keep the full original appearance or structure.

- Luke

[1] https://github.com/LukeEmmet/html2gmi