# Formatting posts using markdown, BBCode, and HTML

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/formatting-posts-using-markdown-bbcode-and-html/239348
**Category:** Using Discourse
**Tags:** reference
**Created:** [August 25, 2014, 5:47am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/formatting-posts-using-markdown-bbcode-and-html/239348 "2014-08-25T05:47:06Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 9

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### Author: ![Canapin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/canapin/32/119591_2.png) [@Canapin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Canapin)
#### Post date: [March 31, 2023, 8:27pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/formatting-posts-using-markdown-bbcode-and-html/239348/9 "2023-03-31T20:27:33Z")

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Hi 🙂

> [@jlc](#):
>
> would the team be open to allowing these attributes?

I think this would be trickier than expected.  
If you create an HTML table in your post, and someone quotes your table, it’s converted into Markdown which doesn’t support `rowspan` and `colspan`.

I suspect there would be other issues I didn’t think about.

> [@jlc](#):
>
> Could we allow `data-*` attributes on table elements? I think this would be very useful for specifying different types of table contents, in particular to use as hooks for custom CSS.

It’s not exactly the same, but you can wrap your table with `[wrap]` tags 🙂  
See: [Customize posts' contents with your own styles](https://meta.discourse.org/t/customize-posts-contents-with-your-own-styles/257738)  
But you won’t be able to have `data-` attributes _inside_ an HTML table (for example, to customize specific rows or cells).

edit: if your table uses Markdown instead of HTML, you can insert spans with `data-` attributes like this:

```plaintext
|Column 1 | Column 2|
|--- | ---|
|<span data-thing>test</span> | test|
|test | test|

```

But they will be removed if someone quotes or copy-paste your table.

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_[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/formatting-posts-using-markdown-bbcode-and-html/239348)._