I'm not familiar with DocBook, but doesn't it have something analogous to HTML's "definition list"? It occurs to me that some of the "tables" you're discussing might be better served with such a definition list (as is actually currently the case).
Not every two-column table is a definition list, but neither is every definition list best presented as a two-column table (e.g., the definition tags might have widely varying widths, and arbitrarily squeezing them to some narrow column is not necessarily the preferred presentation). The manpage macros do not provide a dedicated list environment, but they provide the basics (RS, RE, TP) with which such lists can be emulated. Turning these lists into tables, though perhaps possible, is not necessarily what the original author might have intended. (Of course, the reverse might also be true, that a list is used although a table is intended, just because this was easier to code.) Nevertheless, does anybody here remember the discussion about AT&T-tbl's "expand column" feature on this list some months back?
