MediaWiki-style table syntax support

[xris@…]

Just a personal preference, but I really like mediawiki's formatting styles for lists and tables (lists, because they make more sense to me, and tables because they're more powerful than trac's implementation).. (by tables, I mean the pipe-format, not the html or pseudo-html formats).

​http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Table#Guide_to_the_pipe_syntax

[Matthew Good]

MediaWiki's ​pipe table syntax seems decent and supports more sophisticated formatting than the basic table support in Trac now. It seems distinct enough that it could be supported in a way that also allows backwards compatibility with the current table syntax (though if a new table syntax is added, the old one should probably be deprecated at a later time).

I think that the syntax of starting numbered lists with a # would cause formatting problems or confusion with Trac ticket references. Supporting MediaWiki-style syntax for bulleted lists would then be inconsistent, and I don't see a distinct advantage of the syntax, so I don't think that it would make sense to support either of the list syntaxes.

[Christian Boos]

I also prefer Trac's list syntax to MediaWiki's one. In MediaWiki, you can't get multi-line items: a newline marks the end of the item.

About the Table syntax: sure, it's more powerful, but how does it compare with table written using WikiRestructuredText? One can always have an embedded block of {{{!rst }}} for getting more complex content, e.g.

Header 1	Header 2	Header 3
body row 1	column 2	column 3
body row 2	RestructuredText
body row 3	Cells may span rows.	Cells contain blocks.
body row 4

Besides, if we would enhance Trac's own table syntax, we should rather consider the ​MoinMoin's table syntax, for consistency with the rest of the Wiki syntax.

[Christian Boos]

Note: the above table was obtained with the following markup:

{{{
#!rst
+------------+------------+-----------+
| Header 1   | Header 2   | Header 3  |
+============+============+===========+
| body row 1 | column 2   | column 3  |
+------------+------------+-----------+
| body row 2 |`RestructuredText`:trac:|
+------------+------------+-----------+
| body row 3 | Cells may  | - Cells   |
+------------+ span rows. | - contain |
| body row 4 |            | - blocks. |
+------------+------------+-----------+
}}}

[werner.krauss@…]

I like wackos way of making tables very easy:

​http://wackowiki.com/WackoDocDeutsch/Formatierung?v=18ix#h7949-10 (sorry, i only find german description atm)

one tag for start and end of table (#row begins and ends with

and	#)

table cell seperator is |

and the best: rows can be in more lines like

|| cell 1
|cell 2
still cell2
||

this way you can easily make quite complicate tables using wiki syntax.

hth

werner

[Christian Boos]

Improved table support (esp. multi-line cells with arbitrary content) should definitely be on the feature list of 1.0 (if not earlier).

[dinkumator@…]

I want to give this a little bump. I noticed MoinMoin has much nicer table support (spans etc) which matches with the current implementation style. ​http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/HelpOnTables

[wladston@…]

I prefer the mediawiki's for a sole reason - wiki links…

I find muth better to do Page about something than PageAboutSomething as a link …

[Christian Boos]

Replying to wladston@…:

I prefer the mediawiki's for a sole reason - wiki links…

I find muth better to do Page about something than PageAboutSomething as a link …

This is off-topic, we're talking about Tables here, not Links (and you may want to check the TracIni#wiki-section for the split_page_names option, maybe you'll like it better that way).

On the topic of tables, see TracDev/Proposals/AdvancedWikiFormatting#SimpleTables.

[Christian Boos]

Trac pipe-based syntax for tables has been much improved (see 0.12/WikiFormatting) and complex tables are now possible in Trac via WikiProcessors (see 0.12/WikiHtml).

Hence, supporting the MediaWiki ​pipe-based syntax for tables, while still interesting for compatibility reasons, becomes somewhat less urgent.