On Thu, 23 Aug 2007, David Fetter wrote:
>> -Is the Wiki the right place to build this table at? Large Wiki
>> tables get very difficult to manage.
> They're very easy to manage using things like the Firefox/Mozilla
> plugin viewsourcewith
> <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/394>
The kind of issues I'm concerned about here is that the normal way to deal
with Wiki tables is to use the so-called "pipe" syntax for them (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Table ). That means that any time you
add a column, you have a laborious process to edit all the rows that are
already there, and it's really a pain. And viewsourcewith presumes one
has a good editor that understands Wiki tables; I'm not aware of one. Am
open to ideas if you know of one.
There's an alternate approach that says to treat everything as straight
HTML tables, then there are all kinds of external editors available that
can be enabled with a tool like you suggest. I don't like doing that
because then it's much harder for people to do spot edits within the
Wikipedia framework because the harder to read HTML table markup is in
there.
Another way to go about this is construct the table in a spreadsheet or
similar grid-oriented application as the primary document, then convert it
to Wiki format using something like http://area23.brightbyte.de/csv2wp.php
This is way easier to get an initial table going than any other approach.
The problem is that it's one-way.
This issue is much bigger than the editing here; if you follow the links
on Help:Table you can see people have been arguing about how to proceed
here for years with little progress. The tables that have been built
within the developer's wiki so far have been reasonable to maintain
because more rows get added, but rarely columns. This feature comparision
table will be the other way around, which is the harder one to cope with.
--
* Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD
