Re: Tables in Gemini

On Tue, 30 Jul 2024 10:50:50 -0700, news wrote:

The difficulty of display can include tables not lined up properly; even
this document has some examples of this.

That is the case. But it also the case with current tables, unless there
is some crazy gemini client that can understand T/CSV out there.

Furthermore, use of Unicode will make it less likely to line up
properly, due to the use of fonts and due to ambiguous widths; Gemini
does not require the use of Unicode although non-Unicode text is less
likely to be supported (and some programs will just convert them to
Unicode anyways, which results in the same problem of fonts and
ambiguous widths if you are not careful) as well as requiring a single
character encoding for the entire file.

This is why I proposed it in the first place.

Data types and alignment are also not considered. This would mean that
the user must manually enter data types if they wish to sort or filter
it (or convert it to a scatter plot or pie chart or other graphics).
(CSV and HTML also do not specify data types, and I would have wanted to
avoid to make the same mistake as before.)

To be quite honest I have never considered it, as I was mostly focused on
making it so that Wikipedia can be reasonably implemented in gemini.

This too complex ... I disagree. It is somewhat complex, but I don't
think that it is really that complex.

 
I think it is somewhat too complex.
>

Ok.

This is unnecessary ... tables are good at laying out regular data,
which I think is a useful thing

 
I agree that laying out regular data is a useful thing, but I think this
is not the best way to do it. I think linking to a separate CSV file
would do it (although CSV lacks data types and some of these other
features, but it is simpler to get it to work).

Do you think that creating new filetype for cases with these features are
needed is a good compromise?