[pmwiki-users] Some experiments with whitespace indentation
Jonathan Scott Duff
duff at pobox.com
Sun Oct 16 23:09:36 CDT 2005
On Sun, Oct 16, 2005 at 10:29:57PM -0400, Neil Herber 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.
I have to say that my initial thought was that Patrick has been
playing with Python lately or something.
But, then I realized ...
On Sun, Oct 16, 2005 at 08:40:15PM -0500, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 17, 2005 at 01:58:41PM +1300, John Rankin wrote:
> > 3. What's the rationale for choosing spaces at the start
> > of a line over continuation markup at the end of the
> > previous line?
>
> A1: It's what authors tend to naturally. In fact, look at how
> you indented the text under the "1." and "3." in the questions
> you sent in the email... :-)
>
> A2: The markup ends up looking like the resulting output.
And it just so happens that one of my favorite text manipulation tools
(the perl module Text::Autoformat) formats numbered lists in just this
manner. So, it would be mighty convienent if pmwiki suddenly honored
this common convention so that I could then use Text::Autoformat when
editing wiki pages just as I normally do when editing email.
On Sun, Oct 16, 2005 at 10:29:57PM -0400, Neil Herber wrote:
> 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.
Um ... then don't use this markup? I don't think that Pm is
suggesting this format to the exclusion of others; just that this
would be an additional alternative (that's presumably mediated by a
variable that the WikiAdmin can set).
I think that the only people that will be confused are those that run
across this markup accidently and are surprised by the results. I
also think that the odds of this happening are quite small.
-Scott
--
Jonathan Scott Duff
duff at pobox.com
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