A middle ground would work better to display non-text data while preserving the tabular format, and not prioritizing one of the result fields over the others. Perhaps, to preserve the current functionality of the table view, a new "rich table" view could be added, that includes rendering for images, geocoordinates, musical notation, geographic shapes, etc.

It’s worth noting that a few other data types are already rendered specially:

• IRIs become hyperlinks.
• IRIs that can be abbreviated are also abbreviated (wd:Q42).
• IRIs that are entities also get an “explore” button.
• IRIs that are Wikimedia Commons images get a “media viewer” button (though it seems to be broken at the moment).
• Datetime literals are formatted as dates.
• MathML is injected inline.

I think that’s all of them, but I might have missed some.

We’re also thinking about making the table view more configurable in T227702 – that could also be used to make rich view of other data types available, without enabling it by default (in case we don’t want that).

In T223736#5503032, @Lucas_Werkmeister_WMDE wrote:

We’re also thinking about making the table view more configurable in T227702 – that could also be used to make rich view of other data types available, without enabling it by default (in case we don’t want that).

I would definitely like to be able to choose whether to display images or just links to the images and I'd also prefer not displaying them by default because even when I want to see images, I want to get the query working first.

Another non-text data field that is not currently rendered in the table view are audio files.

Supporting this would be of great help. For example, it would allow audios to be played in a query that lists lexemes with their "pronunciation audio" (link to the property).