[Pmwiki-users] rendering question about lists (somewhat important)

[Reimer Behrends]

On Mon, Feb 02, 2004 at 04:26:40PM -0700, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> This is a somewhat important question regarding the vertical spacing of
> bullet, numbered, and definition lists in PmWiki.  
> 
> By default, most browsers add a blank line before and after a top-level
> list.

Actually, browsers do not insert blank lines, but the greater of the
paragraph and list margins as whitespace. This just happens to be
1.33em, i.e. the fontsize plus the standard vertical space between
lines in the default CSS.

> Thus, the markup
> 
>    Here is some text
>    * bullet 1
>    * bullet 2
>    * bullet 3
>    Here is some more text
> 
> usually ends up being displayed with blank lines before and after
> the bullet list.

This is generally the intended effect. Like most other deviations from
continuous text, such as blockquotes, vertical lists are usually meant
to be visually offset from the surrounding text.

> Using CSS I can turn this behavior off, so that the resulting bullet
> list appears next to the surrounding text, same as it appears
> in the markup.  I'd like to do this by default in PmWiki's stylesheets
> --is that a really bad idea or would that cause anyone any heartache?

I'm not particularly wild about using markup to control layout. Also, I
doubt that it can be turned off portably -- you'll require CSS2 features
that are not universally supported.

> If a WikiAuthor wants blank lines displayed around the bullet items 
> then she can add them using the markup:
> 
>    Here is some text
> 
>    * bullet 1
>    * bullet 2
>    * bullet 3
> 
>    Here is some more text
> 
> If a WikiAdministrator wants to restore the browser default behaviors,
> he can do so by overriding or modifying the default stylesheets.
> 
> The advantages:  authors get much greater control over the vertical layout
> of items.

Shouldn't that be consistent throughout a site and therefore be defined
in a central location (such as the site's CSS file), rather than vary on
a case-by-case basis?

I am not really sure what it is supposed to accomplish, to be honest.
Could you elaborate?

[...]

			Reimer Behrends