Question: In the UX community, is there an agreed best practice to represent table data in textual format?
Desired outcome: If the answer is yes, then I would propose pushing for support in Commonmark.
Background
I’m writing most of my documents in Markdown. It’s mostly great, with one of the biggest caveats being lack of native support for tables (HTML is allowed).
On the other hand, Textile has rich, native table support, based upon using the |
character, like so:
|_. Col 1 |_. Col2 |
| A1 | B1 |
| A2 | B2 |
The Confluence wiki has a similar setup:
|| Col 1 || Col 2 ||
| A1 | B1 |
| A2 | B2 |
Wikipedia’s suggested markup is quite different:
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Col 1
! Col 2
|-
| A1
| B1
|-
| A2
| B2
|}
They also allow the use of !!
and ||
for new cells without line breaks.
Over at Commonmark (the Markdown standardisation effort), there’s a long debate on how tables should best be represented as text. To facilitate that discussion, I’m wondering if anyone has actually researched the subject, and if yes, was a conclusion reached? Is there a best practice the UX community could propose for CommonMark?