Actually, I think that this particular often-touted advantage is a wash. The "approachableness" of ReST is questionable, especially once you get into the weird corner cases where the syntax just completely falls apart and turns into an incomprehensible line-noise jumble. I mean, the syntax for tables reads like a joke about how trying to make the plain-text input look like the output is a bad idea: <http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/ref/rst/restructuredtext.html#tables>. Consider trying to re-flow the contents of a table cell after adding text to it, for example. Plus, a _lot_ of people know HTML -- still many more than know ReST, I would argue -- and lore adds relatively little to HTML. However, the motivation for choosing HTML was that "any day now" there would be a good, commonly used, GUI editor for HTML documents and we could easily annotate the output of one of those with the extra metadata that lore wanted. That hasn't happened. What *has* happened is that despite the difficulty involved in parsing and emitting ReST as compared to something fairly regular like HTML or XML, tools like these have been emerging: http://kib2.free.fr/reSTinPeace/ http://blog.enthought.com/?p=127
Not to detract from any of the points you've made regarding reST's table syntax, but I've found it to be quite livable-with using table.el. Emacs users might be interested: http://table.sourceforge.net/ Laurens