Re: Feature Idea: docx -> HTML table styling

[John MacFarlane <jgm-TVLZxgkOlNX2fBVCVOL8/A@public.gmane.org>]

Noah Malmed <nmalmed-O2gogPphfo5dNrB6XyqITwC/G2K4zDHf@public.gmane.org> writes:

> Hi John,
>
> Thanks for responding! I have a few clarifying questions mainly around 
> Attr, because I don't quite understand what values are stored.
>
> When you say adding `vertical-align` to attributes should be okay, how do 
> you mean? Would it be more appropriate to store it in the XML format that 
> docx uses to denote vertical alignment?

I would say not.  We'd prefer something generic that could be
interpreted by various writers, not something docx-specific.

> As well, I think I was a little thrown off by some of the black box testing 
> we did on the HTML reader. When we ran `pandoc -f html -t native` on the 

Yes, it's true that the HTML reader will store style attributes
(and any other attributes) on table cells.  These won't really
have much meaning outside of an HTML context.  But it makes more
sense for the HTML reader to behave this way than, e.g., for
the docx reader to add HTML-specific attributes.

I don't know what the best solution is.  Pandoc is really
designed to preserve the features of documents that are encoded
in its types.  Anything else  -- including the use of
"stringly typed" attributes -- is a bit of a hack, and tends to
lead to unmaintainable messes down the road.

We could try to establish some generic conventions for
representing things like vertical-alignment in the attributes,
e.g. with a "vertical-align" attribute that gets interpreted
by different writers, but as I said, once we depart from the
structured types things get to be a bit of a mess.