What is and isn't supported for MDITA tables

[darrenn-jackson]

My DITA-OT version: 4.0.2
My lwdita plugin version: 5.1.0

I've been testing MDITA table support recently and found some mismatches between:

• the draft spec
• what the lwdita plugin actually supports
• the draft spec and itself
• the draft spec and the official MultiMarkdown documentation for tables

I hope to get some clarification here so that we can file the appropriate issues/PRs against the draft spec, DITA-OT docs, and lwdita plugin code and fix what we can.

Column and row spans in MDITA tables

The [DITA-OT docs] (https://www.dita-ot.org/dev/reference/markdown/MDITA-syntax.html#tables) say MDITA tables are based on MultiMarkdown tables, but the LwDITA draft spec says MDITA tables don't support spans (https://dita-lang.org/lwdita/components/lw-stentry.html). MultiMarkdown tables do support column spans , but the example MultiMarkdown table in that documentation does not render correctly at all using the built-in html5 transtype:

|             |          Grouping           ||
First Header  | Second Header | Third Header |
 ------------ | :-----------: | -----------: |
Content       |          *Long Cell*        ||
Content       |   **Cell**    |         Cell |

New section   |     More      |         Data |
And more      | With an escaped '\|'         ||  

However, the MultiMarkdown way of spanning multiple columns does work in MDITA:

| Ingredient       | Amount   | Unit shipped |
| ---------------- | -------- | ------------ |
| Gohan rice       |         **a lot**      ||
| Soya paper sheet | 1 pc     | 10 pc        |
 [Fancy roll ingredients]

MDITA Table titles

The draft spec has an example MDITA table with a title. This example doesn't use MultiMarkdown syntax for a table title. But then at the bottom of the same page it says "MDITA does not have a formal way to associate a title with a table". The MultiMarkdown syntax for setting a table title does work fine though with my DITA-OT and lwdita plugin.

Questions for @jelovirt and @infotexture

• Does the lwdita plugin parse MDITA tables as MultiMarkdown because that's what Markdown DITA input uses and the MDITA table syntax in the LwDITA draft spec obviously isn't fully fleshed out and consistent?
• Do we have any signal from the LwDITA SC about what Markdown flavor they want to settle on for table syntax in MDITA?