Plugin: bootstrap
Author: anarcat
Included in ikiwiki: no
Enabled by default: no
Included in goodstuff: no
Currently enabled: no

Rationale

One of the most annoying features of bootstrap and/or the (informal) bootstrap theme is the lack of styling on tables. It makes tables look horrible! Look, for example, as the table in this page: margins are tiny so everything is jumbled up together, and there are very little visual markers to differenciate between cells. I don't have a better example handy, but this is particularly bad when a cell ends up having long lines of text that are wrapped with multiple lines.

Bootstrap has a nice table style that is not automatically applied to all tables, probably to avoid breaking table-based layout and other custom controls like calendars a random site might spew out. Unfortunately, the various Ikiwiki output plugins (most notably the mdwn plugin) do not add that class to generated tables.

Solution

I found there are two ways of fixing that. One is to use raw HTML: the htmlscrubber plugin will let through class elements in tables so this will actually work:

<table class="table"><tr><td>This<td>is<tr>a<tr>table!</table>

But of course, it would be nice if Markdown-formatted tables would actually render correctly as well. For this, I have written a simple plugin that adds that class to empty table tags. It's very dumb, but it should generally work, or at least it works for my case. It will not touch any <table> tag that already has other class elements, so it should be safe to use alongside other plugins that generate their own <table> markup, provided they do add some sort of class, id or other attribute. Unfortunately, the bibtex plugin does not do that correctly and somewhat looks ugly with this plugin. Compare for example, this old version with the new rendering. I'm still unsure which one looks better, actually...

Discussion

Anyways, I wasn't quite sure where to put this, but it seems like an important improvement to make if we're going to merge bootstrap branch. I am not sure of the implementation at all: the best way I found to edit only the rendered content (and not the whole HTML page with the template) is to use the sanitize hook, but I'm not sure it's the right way to go. It certainly seems backwards to introduce new markup in a "sanitization" procedure. Furthermore, I first tried to change all <table> tags even if they had extra attributes, but I found I didn't want to add class attributes to elements that already had some, soand that ended up making the regex work way too messy, so I stuck to the simpler way.

Furthermore, there might be other markup elements we want to improve upon. This only fixes tables, but maybe other elements would benefit from additionnal styling. The content section of the bootstrap docs says there are special classes for tags like img, form, input and div that might be interesting to look at...

-- anarcat