Simplified table syntax

The title in itself is a whole program.

See TableSyntax (and more pointedly, HelpOnTables.)

''Do we support these MoinMoin:HelpOnTables style tables? Should we? I don't see a lot of improvement in terms of ease of use, as against regular HTML. One of the great things about wiki, of course, is that people don't need to know much to get started. Tables are always going to have some kind of learning curve, I suppose. But we should keep it very simple.''

MoinMoin: table syntax is quite simple and on a par with wikiwiki italics and bold. I agree it does not improve a lot compared to html syntax (see below for examples contributed by several). But what I had in mind go further: allowing inputing tables as a special kind of pages which could be inserted anywhere and edited separetely from pages which contain them.
 * In fact, I would suggest that we find a syntax for InternalTransclusion.

See the relevant pages for comments on this idea. --OprgaG

I like the MoinMoin table syntax and vote for implementing it. --Kurt Jansson

I vastly prefer the MoinMoin table mark-up and I think it makes things much easier for the typical editor. With MoinMoin markup a table can mostly just look like a test formatted table; the |- separator lines are intensely distracting when I use MediaWiki tables. It's really a pity since MediaWiki syntax ... particularly for linking ... is much nicer, and the default HTML rendering and styles are, IMNSHO, much better. The one other MoinMoin markup element I'd prefer to see MW adopt would be the {{{ for pre/code text ... with the optional #! for syntax highlighting. Those are very nice when discussing code/scripting examples. (I'm not sure quite how we'd disambiguation inline TT from the use of triple-braces in templates, though). JimD 01:46, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Having just painstakingly worked on Las Vegas/Climate (no longer seems to exist), I can say that I second the proposal for a simplified use of tables. I looked at the code, and realized that this is an option I can set. So I have for now turned it ON, unless someone comes up with a very good reason why we shouldn't.

The HTML syntax is not too bad, and people can't really do very much evil with it. Edit this page to see how I made this table in html.

A very simple table:

This should be added as a link to the group with "How to Start a Wiki page," How to Edit a Wiki Page," etc., and renamed "How to Add a Table". RoseParks

A little bit fancier table:

MoinMoin is horrid! --Far more HTML like than my proposal on SourceForge. How in the world is having to still use bgcolor and HTML color codes better than {light blue}? --maveric149