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When I see "should", I can't help wondering if someone is making an unfair moral judgement.
My personal taste is for data to be presented in the simplest form that is usable. Looking at Xinren Wang, I find the list on that page to be perfectly readable. I don't see what's gained by putting an extra layer of wrapping around it.
On the other hand, if we make a habit of marking things with notes like "this should be in a table", then the process of creating/editing pages becomes that little bit more complicated. It might put people off contributing to the library.
This is intended to temporarily encourage editors like you and me to use tables... since making tables out of table-like data is so boring (as I and Herman may testify). I certainly would not flood SL with these tags. Cheers Tapir
PS I changed the page name.
No, I don't feel encouraged. Maybe it's just me being eccentric :-)
Right now we're in a good position to compare Xinren Wang (in table format, thanks Herman) with Tianyuan (plain text at the time of writing). I don't find either to be more attractive than the other, they both look equally good to me. (Except that "Tianyuan" has this ugly box at the top with a complaint.) But if you press the "edit" page link, you find that "Tianyuan" is slightly easier to add to or change than "Xinren Wang" is. So for this simple example, the cost seems to outweigh the benefit.
I'm sure there are examples of more elaborate tables that really do benefit from good formatting. But I think that insisting on using tables for simple lists is going overboard.
Uglifying the page by putting \{\{table\}\} at the top without actually making the table is the worst of both worlds.
At least, that is my opinion. If others strongly disagree, then I'll say no more on the subject ;-)
Well, I don't disagree (strongly). The tables were constantly requested in the past, but still rarely used in present. After table-fying the KPMC results (which look better with table imho) I felt this task is really tedious and I don't like to be the one to table-fy the bulk of SL pages (still I made quite a number of them). I won't put those tags in all tournament pages etc. but it isn't a bad idea imvho to give a hint to someone who wants to contribute despite being in a somewhat uncreative mood. After table-fying the majority of the relevant pages I'm happy to delete this ugly box.
For tournament pages I was happy with the old presentation as well (and I certainly won't make tables instead of simple lists though tournament pages are at least elaborated lists :). But for tables like in Rank worldwide comparison or result tables it really helps.
One of the advantages of the tables is that it works better technically. By using table tags, you're telling the browser that it is tabled data. One advantage of this, for example, is that you can cut and paste into a spreadsheet like Excel, and it will put each field in its own cell. With the preformatted text version, each line will end up entirely in a single cell.
Another advantage is that tables allow any font to be used and flow naturally, which can improve readability for those with bad vision. Preformatted text requires a fixed width font, which has readability disadvantages Eg:
WWWWWWWWWWWWW AAAAAAAAAAAAA
Note how in the fixed width example, the W is slightly squashed together to fit the same width as the A, not much of a problem for most people, but those with bad eyesight may find it hard to read.
Sorry to comment on this, but the fixed width sample here is actually more readable than the other, because it has a font with serif. Comparing two serif fonts would give a better example.
Yes, but I can't change the stylesheet for Sensei's :-)
What really is needed is a tool to automatically generate the required wiki syntax for tables. Doing it all by hand is rather tedious. Something like Microsoft Excel's text to columns feature seems good - on occasion I have actually used that feature to generate tables, SL or otherwise.
I often use UltraEdit's column mode, which allows selection of any rectangular block in a text, and is thus easily able to add pipelines and such.
We have a discussion about it...
I don't like tables for lists. I do like tables for more elaborate stuff. I'm not sure about tournament pages, but I seem to like tables a little more than Xela...
I don't have any strong opinions about it, though. How about you?
For me, the main motivation for turning preformatted text into tables is that I find monospaced fonts rather ugly. Apart from codes (programs, wikis, etc.), ASCII art, and stuff that are intended for the command line, I prefer to see non-monospaced fonts.
Well, I don't turn lists into tables without a good reason. Otherwise, I don't have that strong an opinion.