[pmwiki-users] Some experiments with whitespace indentation

John Rankin john.rankin at affinity.co.nz
Sun Oct 16 21:58:29 CDT 2005


On Monday, 17 October 2005 3:29 PM, Neil Herber <nospam at eton.ca> wrote:
>At 2005-10-17  01:58 PM +1300, John Rankin is rumored to have said:
>>5. Just an observation -- matching the exact number of spaces
>>    seems a bit fragile; for example this is incorrect:
>
>This is more than just an observation - it is a massive
>understatement.
>
>Relying on white space for any kind of markup (indents, list 
>components, or preformatted text)  strikes me as one of the weakest 
>parts of PmWiki.
>
>If PmWiki is truly to be author friendly, then it needs to have 
>markup that is clear and unambiguous. Aligning spaces is too
>hit-or-miss.
>
This was another reason MarkupExtensions went for

* an item::
its continuation

There is no mistaking the author's intention. But I take
Patrick's point that it's not particularly natural or
friendly.

I think what you are getting at is that wiki markup is
an explicit instruction to do something, whereas using
the space bar to align text is just a typewriter habit
that only works for non-proportional fonts. My guess is
that anyone who has been taught to use a word processor
has probably also been taught not to use whitespace to
indent text.

-- 
JR
--
John Rankin






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