So the standard does not provide a standard?

I find the dokuwiki table syntax to be pretty simple and effective, or the markdown extra version. Don't know why none has been made a standard part of markdown yet. Seems like it must be due to backlash against table-based web designs of the 1990s, (which resulted in an entire generation of web developers thinking that tables are inherently evil and an entire generation of non-developers who just do things in MS Word or Excel instead because it's relatively easy to make tables).

> So the standard does not provide a standard?

A standard can be descriptive (bottom-up) or top-down (prescriptive). A descriptive standard will only check and document common-ish features to implementations. Tables are not one of them.

Yes, they’re part of Markdown Extra[0], written by Michel Fortin.

[0]: http://web.archive.org/web/20140830092621/https://michelf.ca...

Does the spec allow extensions?

So are fenced code blocks.

I assume the spec is descriptive, and fenced code blocks are 1. a pretty common extension and 2. generally added the same way everywhere

Reddit and GFM use the same table syntax. Reddit is huge [1]. GFM is widespread.

PHP Markdown, MultiMarkdown, etc also support that syntax. Stack Overflow is pretty much the exception [2].

I'm not interested in Markdown parsers which do not support tables. They are useless to me.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/about/ - "last month, reddit had 114,540,040 unique visitors"

[2] http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/138946/can-we-add-ma...