better_tables

Better Tables

This Pelican plugin removes the excess attributes and elements in the HTML tables generated from reST. Trimming this fat allows them to pass HTML5 validation. Hopefully rst2html5 will be merged into Pelican at some point, but until then, this hacky approach is needed.

This approach has the advantage of restoring sanity to tables, and allows their column width to flow normally. All styling is default and must be styled by CSS rather than in HTML attributes.

I make no claim that all HTML table crimes generated are corrected — merely the ones that I have stumbled across.

Requirements

• Beautiful Soup 4

What does it do?

At the moment, the following is stripped from tables (though when in doubt, check the source as it may be updated and out-of-sync with this document).

• <colgroup> element (and its evil <col> children)
• table > border attribute
• <tbody> and <thead> > valign attribute

Usage

Enable the plugin in your pelicanconf.py:

PLUGINS = [
    # ...
    'better_tables',
    # ...
]

And that's it. Life's simple like that sometimes.