Sunday, January 01, 2012

WordPress doesn't have a built-in table editor

The WordPress visual editor doesn't include tables. Neither does Blogger of course, nor, for that matter, MarsEdit.

FrontPage had terrific table support in 1995. WindowsLive Writer has decent support now. Otherwise, web tables doesn't get a lot of love. RapidWeaverdoesn't do tables. Sandvoxisn't any better and neither is Apple's abandoned iWeb.

SeaMonkey inherits the table technology built into Netscape Composer in the 1990s. TextEdit does tables (!) and (unlike Pages) will export HTML. It's hardly a web page editor though.

DreamWeaver does tables - and costs $400 (though I qualify for the $150 teacher edition).

It's too bad. HTML tables are really brilliant. I'm guessing implementation is very expensive especially when tables are combined with CSS; the market doesn't support this level of complexity.

2 comments:

  1. May not be exactly what you want as it's not built into the editor by the looks of it, but you could try using something like:

    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-table-reloaded/

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  2. Thanks Dempsey. The plugins help, but I sure miss FrontPage's tables.

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