[[!meta author="anarcat"]]
[[!template id=plugin name=bootstrap author="[[anarcat]]"]]
[[!tag type/chrome]]
[[!template  id=gitbranch branch=anarcat/bootstrap author="[[anarcat]]"]]

## Rationale

One of the most annoying features of bootstrap and/or the (informal)
[[bootstrap theme|todo/merge_bootstrap_branch/]] is the lack of styling on tables. It makes
tables look horrible! Look, for example, as the table in [this
page](https://web.archive.org/web/20180513200625/https://anarc.at/blog/2018-04-12-terminal-emulators-1/): 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](https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.0/content/tables/) 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 [[plugins/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
[[plugins/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](https://gitlab.com/anarcat/ikiwiki/blob/bootstrap/IkiWiki/Plugin/bootstrap.pm) 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 [[plugins/contrib/bibtex]]
plugin does not do that correctly and somewhat looks ugly with this
plugin. Compare for example, [this old version](https://web.archive.org/web/20170717065911/https://anarc.at/communication/) with [the new
rendering](https://web.archive.org/web/20180626203321/https://anarc.at/communication/). 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 
[[todo/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](https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.0/content/reboot/) 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]]