[Pmwiki-users] Re: Idea for extension of special list syntax

[Neil Herber]

At 2005-01-22  04:29 PM +0100, chr at home.se is rumored to have said:
>Howver, I think the ability to easily spot misalignment in practice
>requires the lines to be consequitive. This means that the alignment
>principle may not be practical for advanced examples with items that
>continue on a different level. I assume this is what you were thinking of
>Neil?

Christian

My concern was with some of the later examples (not yours) that had 4 or 5 
levels with inset paragraphs and non-sequential numbering.

It seemed to me that we might be wasting a lot of valuable brain-power 
trying to come up with a way of having PmWiki parse arbitrarily complex 
lists when some kind of generic markup (like my plus-sign example) could 
handle anything with only simple parsing required.

Patrick pointed out that there were no HTML constructs to create arbitrary 
hanging indents for lists, but that just re-enforces my point - we are 
asking PmWiki to do things that you can't even markup in HTML.

My other point was that these complex nestings were probably very rare, and 
spending a lots of time to accommodate them was a waste of effort. Authors 
who valued such lists would find this an unreasonable stand.

As for your examples, detecting alignment that uses spaces relies too much 
on adjacency (as you noted) and on letter shapes. It's easy to align 
consecutive Ls and Is, bit what about a T followed by an O? It took me 
weeks to notice that there was a version of the [=..=] markup that had a 
leading space. That is why I suggested a visible marker, such as >[=...=]. 
Maybe my old eyes are not as sharp as your young ones? Have pity on us geezers!


Neil

Neil Herber
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