[pmwiki-users] RFC: Core candidate offerings . . .

[christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com]

On Fri, 31 Mar 2006, Ben Wilson wrote:

> I oppose this for a couple obvious reasons. First, all popular wikis use
> intervening whitespace to divide paragraphs. Second, virtually all
> emails are written using intervening whitespace to divide paragraphs.
> Why offer yet-another-way to do something that works?

> I'll warrant that authors will opt to add the newlines anyway to
> visually distinquish the paragraphs. I mean, the reason why we add the
> whitespace is to quickly identify the demarcation between paragraphs.
> In "old-fashioned" writing, people indented rather than add white
> space because it conserved paper. As I mentioned above, any
> conservatory benefit is trivial with either of these new paragraph
> proposals.

To me the whitespace also signifies a new pararaph, but I tend to think
along lines of what-you-see-is-what-you-mean rather than WYSIWYGI. As for
the appeearance of the output, that's something I'd like to control
separately from the content. So how about introducing directives that
enables/disables paragraph separation? (E.g. (:noparskip:) and
(:parskip:)).  When paragraph separation is enabled, you get a vertical
space between the paragraphs. When it's disabled, you don't.

However, I don't agree about the "old-fashioned" bit though... to me
having an indented first character in a paragraph (not for the first
paragraph!) sometimes simply look better. I guess that's a matter of style
and taste.

/Christian

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