Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Editing/Make it possible to format tables in VisualEditor

Make it possible to format tables in VisualEditor

  • Problem: Currently it's not possible to do many different things for tables using visual editor. You can add rows and columns, but you can't for example add background colours or set text alignment. You always need to change to the wikitext editor if you want to add background colours, and for newbies it may be very difficult to add html code.
  • Who would benefit: Table editors.
  • Proposed solution: Implement more tools for table editing.
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets: phab:T54180, phab:T103276, phab:T99890
  • Proposer: Stryn (talk) 18:38, 16 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • Translations: none yet

Discussion edit

Inline styles are both technically inferior (they make it impossible to have different presentation for different devices, screen sizes etc) and result in poor readability and maintainability of the wikitext. We shouldn't encourage them. TemplateStyles should be the preferred solution for table styling. (That still requires the ability to edit classes of table cells, if not their other properties, though.) --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 12:22, 18 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

There are some pretty valid uses, such as aligning text right for number values as well as setting sort values on individual cells. (Though, I agree, the typical "PRETTY COLORS!" type is pretty obnoxious.) --Izno (talk) 03:53, 19 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
There are valid use cases for formatting table cells, but editing inline CSS is not the right implementation for them. Define the styles somewhere else and implement some kind of HTML class editor in VisualEditor. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 06:27, 19 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Don't get stuck on the discussion above as to what should be possible with tables in VE. Merging/separating cells, copy-pasting to/from excel/libreoffice and many more are possible.--Strainu (talk) 15:31, 26 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Isn't this basically the same as the first one: Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Editing/More table types in editing section? Maybe they should be merged together. --Dvorapa (talk) 09:05, 28 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I wonder whether this should include phab:T180867/phab:T169306. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:24, 1 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Voting edit