[pmwiki] Re: [Pmwiki-users] discussion on line breaks

[Bernhard.Weichel@t-online.de]

Hi,

sorry, I probably restart the discusion

Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 16, 2003 at 03:54:46PM -0500, John Feezell wrote:
>>
>> Also,  what about the possibility of something like:
>> #[/
>>>> item_one||item_two||item_three ||
>>>> item_four|| item_five || item_six||
>>    The above table represents ....
>>    and the ... for years ... and ...
>>    using a base of .../]
>
> Probably not.  I don't want to get into the issues of dealing with
> arbitrary nested block elements--that sounds really nasty in PmWiki's
> current markup engine.  Overall I wasn't intending [/.../] to be a

Patrick, we had this issue alread in the "markup strategy" discussion.
But I feel if we do not find a way to handle arbitrary nested block
elements,
we will end up in more and more non intuitive and ugly markup. Most of
the proposals in that thread appear to me as such.

Arbitrary nested blocks may end in XML. But I've learned in the
"markup discussion" that this is not appropriate for pmwiki.

So my practise at the moment is:

* _exactly one space_ at the beginning of the line creates a
  line break (not a new paragraph). This works very fine for lyrics etc.
  So if one wants PRE, there must be two or more spaces at the beginning
  of a line.

* ending the previous line with "\" suppresses the line break
  in the source. This allows to maintain a good looking source.

The approach does not work in lists and tables due to the block nesting
problem.
In a paragraph, a linebreak in the source is like a space. In a list
the linebreak in the source ends the list resp. the list item.
By this a list item cannot comprise of multiple paragraphs.

So, if by any mean a solution for the nested blocks would be of a great
help.

It could be something like:

* empty lines markup a block sequence. This generates Paragraphs etc.

* [/ ... /] marks a block the contents of which safely produces balanced
  HTML tags. This could serve as something like a "minipage" which can
always
  be embedded without side effects. It should be possible to nest it.

* Markup which appears in pairs such as [[table]] [[tableend]]. In this
  case even the blockstructure of [[cell]] and [[cellnr]] can safely be
  detected. If the markup is complete, PmWiki always generates properly
  balanced HTML tags.

--bernhard