[pmwiki-users] Re: numbered list questions

[Carl Boe]

Thanks to all the replies.

Pierre, Ian, and Radu have all mentioned variants of numbered headings 
as a substitute for the list 'block problem'.  I consider those 
solutions inventive but it does really violate in my mind what a list 
is.  It is not clear how you would distinguish effectively between 
ordered lists, unordered lists, and definitions, and, because it uses 
the wrong element structurally in the hierarchy, it would throw a wrench 
into CSS formatting.  Faced a year later with modifying text marked up 
in such a way, I think I would be gazing at the screen for a long time, 
trying to figure out why headings or TOC markup was being used in such a 
way.  Radu's later argument that lists of any length beyond short lines 
should be restructured as WikiPages is a matter of taste,  is a useful 
observation, but jumping to a new page is a distraction that interrupts 
reading of content and I would not use that approach unless the new page 
warranted freestanding content.

David Spitzley's 'capping' is very close to what I am thinking of, 
although Patrick points out the difficulty when the cap is ambiguous.

Is there difficulty in parsing across newlines when the cap is not 
ambiguous?  Would an explicit blocking structure work, something like:

# One
# Two
# Three <:beginblock:>
|| width=100%
|| Cell 1 || Cell 2||
|| Cell 3 || Cell 4||
A few more words here
And a final paragraph here
<:endblock:>
# Four

...
get translated into HTML with <div></div> blocking like:

<ol>
   <li>One</li>
   <li>Two</li>
   <li>Three
     <div><br>
       <table>
         <tbody>
           <tr>
             <td>Cell 1</td>
             <td>Cell 2 </td>
           </tr>
             <tr>
             <td>Cell 3</td>
             <td>Cell 4</td>
           </tr>
         </tbody>
       </table>
       <p> A few more words here </p>
       <p> And a final paragraph here</p>
       </div>
     </li>
   <li>Four
   </li>
</ol>

That is, this is just a block, with everything interpreted line by line 
just as in standard markup.  To me it is less confusing to have an 
explicit block and to know that a list element is terminated normally by 
a newline than to keep track of context-specific markup such as leading 
spaces.



--Carl