
I think it was one of my professors that said that the internet began as a military/academic network and that the early HTML-version had the basic supports:
• Text, for obvious reasons
• Images, for graphs and diagrams
• Tables, for series of data
I still find it amazing that so few (if any) forums dont have this basic support for tables included. But back to the discussion. I did find a post mentioning the subject (viewtopic.php?f=4&t=11527 ), so i would like to continniue the discussion but more focused.
With the current release (3.0.B4) there is possible to add all the <table>-related html-tags and pull this off in phpBB3, but what would be the point? The function of BBCode is to enhance the usability and speed up the creating of posts. Hence minimizing the need for excess tags. I installed a mod named TableBBCode ( http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=219269 ) on my phpBB2 and it has a really nice syntax ([table][row][col][col][row][/table] and so on.... and only one close-tag) for tables without having to impliment the entire HTML-solution .
In this way the custom BBCode feature is quite limited (if anyone have solved this, feel free to contact me), and the possibility of "open" custom tags is an even worse solution. To bad this issue was not raised in the early stages of phpBB3 development.
To take a step back, is table BBCode really necessary? I was hoping this discussion would prove my point that it is, perhaps even convince the admins/mods to make a poll on the subject.
Discuss on!
Regards
//Kokuei