Good tools for creating tables, including CSS setup, recommendations?

[Chris G]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 05:14:25PM -0600, Tommy Trussell wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 4:48 PM, Chris G <cl at isbd.net> wrote:
> > I want to be able to create tables for displaying information on web
> > pages and I'm looking for tools to help me do this.
> 
> here's an article that compares Screem, Bluefish and Quanta (none of
> which you mentioned as having tried).
> 
> http://www.linux.com/feature/130601
> 
I did mention Bluefish, it does absolutely nothing useful with tables,
all it can do is create a trivially simple table as a template to
start from.  I did also look at Screem though I didn't mention it in
my posting.

None of the above programs addresses my requirements, all they do is
make it a bit easier to format and enter raw HTML, possibly with the
addition of adding an ending tag when you enter a starting one.  A
(moderately) complex table with, say, twenty or thirty rows, three or
four columns and a number of row spans and column spans will still be
difficult to manage with any of them.

The issue is that tables in particular are *much* easier to visualise,
manage and modify *as a table* than as the complicated mess that HTML
represents them as.  I'm looking for some sort of tool that will allow
me to see the form of the table as I create and modify it.  It doesn't
necessarily have to be WYSIWYG, some of the markup languages (as used
in Wikis among other things) have reasonable ways of representing
tables which are then translated to HTML.  For example reStructuredText
has two ways of creating a table the simpler of which is:-

    ========  ===========
    Header A    Header B
    ========  ===========
    Data       Data
    More       More Data
    ========  ===========

This will (if run through rst2html) create a neat table in HTML but
the format doesn't allow much flexibility with row and column spans
etc.  The more complex reStructuredText table format is more flexible
but is hard work to edit, though still a lot easier to 'see' than raw
HTML.  One needs to add CSS to get borders as required but I could
live with that if I could find an elegant mark up language for
creating tables.

A WYSIWYG table creator would be even better but I'm pretty sure there
is no such beast.

-- 
Chris Green