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

Ben Wilson dausha at gmail.com
Fri Mar 31 12:42:10 CST 2006


> Message: 1
> Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 09:19:56 -0600
> From: "Patrick R. Michaud" <pmichaud at pobox.com>
> Subject: [pmwiki-users] RFC: Core candidate offerings
>

<snip>

> Also, comments against adding a proposed feature carry slightly
> more weight than those in favor of it.
>
> The items:

<snip>

> 2.  Lines beginning with a backslash force a new paragraph.  This
>     would allow paragraphs to be started without intervening
>     whitespace as in:

<snip>

> 3.  Another possibility is to have a leading '%' begin a new
>     paragraph; I suspect it's rare to have '%' at the beginning
>     of a line which is also in the middle of a paragraph.  But
>     it is possible -- for example:

<snip>

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?

Third, what chronic problem do these solutions solve? At most two
newlines are two characters, and a slash or percent takes up one.
However, I doubt the space savings is that significant.

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.

--
Ben Wilson
" Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur"




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