Comment by firasd

Comment by firasd 7 hours ago

8 replies

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It's interesting to think about how complex the wikipedia text is compared to something like github flavored markdown or even standard html tables (although I guess it eventually renders into standard html so it's not more complex than the latter when all other html elements are considered in addition to <table>)

For example the swatch internet time infobox is dynamically updated

{{short description|Alternate time system by watch maker Swatch}} {{Infobox | image = [[File:Swatch beat Logo.svg|200px|alt=Logo of Swatch Internet Time]] | caption = Logo of Swatch Internet Time | title = Time{{efn|at page generation }} {{purge|(update to view correct time)}} | label1 = 24-hour time (UTC) | data1 = {{nowrap|{{#time:H:i:s}}}} | label2 = 24-hour time (CET) | data2 = {{Time|CET|dst=no|df-cust=H:i:s|hide-refresh=yes}} | label3 = .beat time (BMT) | data3 = {{nowrap|@{{#expr: floor( {{#expr:{{#expr:{{#expr:{{#time:H|now + 1 hour}}3600}}+{{#expr:{{#time:i}}60}}+{{#time:s}}}}/86.4}} )}}}} }}

bawolff 6 hours ago

I always found it ironic that the table syntax is designed to resemble ascii-art type tables, and then literally nobody writes it in a way that looks like an ascii art table.

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  • notpushkin 5 hours ago

    Yeah, because it’s a PITA to align everything by hand.

    But the spaces around | make it easier to read, than, say, CSV.

    Reply View 4 replies
    • fao_ 5 hours ago

      Honestly it continually surprises me how people forget about TSV

      It's the perfect format, more or less! CSV, but no difficulty around commas, and the only major risk being an editor that converts tabs to spaces

      Reply View 1 reply
      • hmry 2 hours ago

        I agree it's great, but that risk is so major that I stopped using it. "There's a 50% chance that your editor will invisibly corrupt the data you enter, and another 30% chance to corrupt the entire file" is just not usable...

        Especially in Zed where the only way to switch hard tabs is buried in the settings menu, and impossible to change per buffer.

        Reply View 0 replies
    • echelon 3 hours ago

      > Yeah, because it’s a PITA to align everything by hand.

      For now. I get the feeling we'll have tooling everywhere that does this soon.

      I was recently tab-completing a Markdown table and whatever autocomplete model I had just fixed the table up without any intervention.

      Reply View 1 reply
      • notpushkin 2 hours ago

        Yeah, it’s not terribly hard to do that even without AI (Prettier can do it, for example). But there’s a lot of places where the tooling just isn’t available. Then again, it’s probably not a big deal if your GitHub comment markup isn’t perfect.

        I think the root of the problem is, almost everything else you use in Markdown is easy to do by hand. There’s just no good syntax for tables like this, I guess.

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stogot 7 hours ago

I’ve spent countless hours at employers fixing Xwiki syntax errors mixed with HTML. The parsing engine must be complex

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