Mimic Tabs in Textile and HTML (in Ruby)?

Question

How do you mimic tabs in HTML? Specifically, I would like to be able to use tabs to align things in a textile document, and convert those to "non-breaking spaces" and whatnot in HTML, using RedCloth in Ruby. Is this possible? Is there an alternative working method?

Answer 1

Of course, textile documents do have the easy-table "markdown"...

|a|simple|table|row|
|And|Another|table|row|