[Pmwiki-users] Re: indent sequence (was: Whitepaper about markup strategy)

[Patrick R. Michaud]

The indented paragraph / colons topic deserves its own thread...

BW>   indented paragraph
BW>   which is simply indented
BW> would be easier to recognize than
BW> : :indented paragraph which is simply indented

JH> I would agree here. The colon has caused me problems with my wikismileys as
JH> well as having times in blockquoted material.
JH> Suggestion for PM: what about replacing : in the current markup with --> for
JH> blockquote?

Alas, one of the places where perhaps I *shouldn't* have followed 
the markup suggested in "The Wiki Way" :-).  Some background...

The colons don't really mean "indent" -- they really mean 
"definition lists", as in:

	:term:definition
	:apple:A red, yummy fruit.

Early on in wiki history someone discovered that you could just leave
the term part out of the colons and you'd get indented text.  

	: :Hey, I have no term, so I look indented!

Since this didn't take any additional code to implement, and it 
didn't eat up any more markup characters (and the recent emails
all show how important a consideration this is), the colons became
the standard markup for indented text on a lot of wikis.

But, it does have some problems; a lot of people learn that they
can sometimes leave out the space

	::I don't have a term either, and I'm indented!

because the term is empty, and this works fine until the text they
want to indent contains a colon and fits the larger "term"->"definition"
pattern:

	:: 3:00pm - hey wait, what happened here?

PmWiki (and other wikis) treat this as a double-indented "3" -> "00pm..."
definition.  The problem goes away if you put the space between
the first pair of colons.

A lot of the more recent wikis now use semicolon+colon for term
lists, as in

	;term:definition
	;apple:A yummy fruit
	;: Times like 3:00pm are no longer a problem for indented text!

and in retrospect I wish I had done this for PmWiki.  I can certainly
switch PmWiki to use ;:, but that might break a lot of existing pages.
I could support both :: and ;:, or have :: be an option, but somehow
it seems wasteful to have both markups available to do essentially
the same thing.  So I haven't done anything until I know what to do here.

As an extension, I think the ->, -->, ---> markup suggestion for indented
text has a *lot* of merit.  One could write:

	->This is indented one level
	--> This is indented two levels.
	---> This is a section of text indented three levels.

	->This is a lot of text
	->that is indented by one level
	->even though it appears on separate lines
	->and it's another way of 
	->writing text without needing [[<<]].

However, I'd like to know if there are others who really like the -->
sequence before I add it to PmWiki.

Pm