Hi Peter,

On Fri, 16 Jul 2010 07:05:19 -0600, Peter Münster <pmlists@free.fr> wrote:

On Thu, Jul 15 2010, Idris Samawi Hamid ادريس   سماوي حامد wrote:

Question for all: for MkIV, should we recommend ONLY natural tables to
newcomers, e.g., in a ConTeXt Book?

Hello Idris,

For me, it's yes!  But newcomers need to pay attention in some cases:
- alignment (see issue http://tracker.luatex.org/view.php?id=427 )
- TABLEhead is repeated, TABLEfoot is not
 (see issue http://tracker.luatex.org/view.php?id=116 )

Sure, hopefully by the time we get to that point the bugs will be fixed.

I also see that Wolfgang has wrapped some of the old Tables syntax into a module (as Aditya hinted)... I missed all of these developments :-)

The Tables syntax is certainly less verbose, and may be useful for beginners. But for pedagogical purposes it makes sense to consider Table/Tables deprecated, if not obsolete... So the pedagogical challenge is to make TABLE as easy as possible, perhaps teaching \start/stopTABLE as intro and \b/eTABLE as advanced.