[Docutils-develop] Re: sparse-table

[Nicola L. <ni...@te...>]

> What I'm proposing here is a new directive, very similar to the .. list-table::
> directive, to allow easily building a sparse table, where not all the colums are
> filled with data.

I have a few sparse tables too, this notation would be nice...


> ... sparse-table::
>    :columns: en fr es it de jp
>    :header rows: 1
> 
>    - :en: English
>      :fr: Français
>      :es: Español
>      :it: Italiano
>      :de: Deutsch
>      :jp: Nihongo
> 
>    - :fr: Bonjour
>      :es: Hola
>      :en: Hi
>      :jp: Ohayoo gozaimasu
> 
>    - :en: Goodbye
>      :fr: Au revoir
> 
> One would have to define names to be used to refer to individual columns
> somehow.

...and explicit column names would surely render those large tables
smaller, hence more readable. I would add the possibility to specify a
default value for the non-referenced cells, i.e. "\-", in place of leaving
them empty.


>    - :fr: Café au lait
>      :es: Cafe con leche
>      :en it: Latte

Sorry, wrong example: ;-)

      :it: Caffellatte


> 3. Choose a better name for the directive?

The name seems fine.

-- 
Nicola Larosa - ni...@te...

No inventions have really significantly eased the cognitive difficulty
of writing scalable concurrent applications and it is unlikely that any
will in the near term. [...] Most of all, threads do not help, in fact,
they make the problem worse in many cases. -- G. Lefkowitz, August 2005