[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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