[Pmwiki-users] Motivation for special line continuation (was: Idea for extension..)

[chr@home.se]

On Fri, 21 Jan 2005, Neil Herber wrote:

> Some kind of visible markup should be used. For example:
> 
>          * primary item
>          * secondary item
>          ** sub secondary item
>          > same level as secondary but no hanging bullet
>          * tertiary item
> 
> Is it even possible to render this in HTML? Are we asking PmWiki to do 
> things that  word processors can't do? (Not to start a feature war, just a 
> reality check on what authors might expect to be able to do.)

I wrote my dissertation using LyX (think LaTeX) and used lots of
complicated lists with lots stuff in between items. No problem whatsoever 
although I don't know if MS-Word could do it, but I'd assume so.

As for HTML, I don't think the example above is difficult to do... 
wouldn't

	<ul>
	  <li>primary item</li>
	  <li>secondary item
	      <ul><li>secondary item
	              same level as ...</li>
	      </ul>
	  <li>tertiary item</li>
	</ul>

do what you want? Or maybe I don't understand the part about 'no hanging 
bullet'..?

Anyway, what I really wanted to say was that for most of the lists what 
I'd really like to be able to do is write the list above as:

	* primary item
	* secondary item
	** sub secondary item
	   same level as secondary (continuation of the text actually)
	* tertiary item

The reason I'd like to be able to write it like this is that it looks 
"pretty" to my eyes, and it feels natural to me as the writer...

In addition, being able to write as in the example above makes it *much* 
easier to edit the list item compared to when using line continuation 
characters. Because in that case you manually have to move the '\'s around 
to make sure that they are at the end of a line (with no spaces behind).

Now you could argue.. "well, so just put everything on a single line?", 
but then I'm back to not knowing the difference between a real line break, 
and something that's put there because of the width of the edit form.

If I'm required to put for instance an '>' at the beginning of every line 
that continues the preceeding line I could just as well keep using a '\' 
as line continuation character.

(Let me know if this part was unclear, it's actually a big part of the
reason I want this, but I hadn't thought about it consciously before...)

/Christian

-- 
Christian Ridderstr?m, +46-8-768 39 44               http://www.md.kth.se/~chr