Tables with cells that contain block elements #291
Description
Related to #112 (comment) (but opening a new issue for visibility)
Describe the bug
I'm seeing a couple issue with tables, but probably the most concerning is when an AsciiDoc table contains cells that contain multiple block elements. I don't necessarily think we should support this in docs-builder, but we should definitely have a plan for handling these situations because it's a pretty common pattern across docs, and it makes content very difficult to read.
Example: Cells containing admonitions
| AsciiDoc | doc-builder |
|---|---|
 Link |
 Link |
To get a sense of the scope of this issue, you can search some AsciiDoc docs for (^| )a\| (though that probably won't capture all of the cells). Here's what I got when I checked a few repos:
- elastic/elasticsearch: 10 mentions in 4 files
- elastic/kibana: 102 mentions in 12 files
- elastic/observability-docs: 211 mentions in 29 files
If we want writers to simplify tables and/or un-table-ify content in complex tables more broadly, we can use this regular expression to capture more formatted cells in AsciiDoc files: ( |^)((\d+)|(\.\d+)|(\+|\*)|([\^\.<>]+)|(a|d|e|h|l|m|s))+\|. This should catch spanning columns/rows, duplicating cells, and formatting cells.
Expected behavior
See above...
Steps to reproduce
See above for examples and ways to search for additional affected tables.
Tooling
- docs-builder
- migration tooling
- I'm not sure