Online table editing is very valuable tool - especially in enterprise systems. It could allow a lot of use-cases that require use of database to be done in wiki system itself. Simple form-fills for adding new rows (apart from directly getting table edits) helps simple workflows to be created quickly.

Jotspot demonstrates this nicely, but it seems to hide the actual table data - perhaps storing it in a external datastore associated with the topic. But it is nice to store the table information in topic itself. (Bulk editing, no problems in renaming ...)

But unfortunately there is no standardized syntax for table within a wiki topic (of course we don't have any standard as of now). Wikipedia is evolving to be a great centralized resource, so might propel a standard creation process.

In this context, a useful link is discussion on table syntax:
Help:Table - From Meta; discussion about Wikimedia projects. In particular, even using XHTML as table syntax would help a lot: It might allow someone to create a nice table editing tool - with plugin approach to add semantics such as Spreadsheet ...

-Vinod
permalink 3:54 PM