[pmwiki-users] historical question

Joachim Durchholz jo at durchholz.org
Fri Apr 29 08:12:32 CDT 2005


Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 28, 2005 at 04:29:29PM -0500, Jonathan Scott Duff wrote:
> 
>>On Thu, Apr 28, 2005 at 05:06:40PM -0400, Radu wrote:
>>
>>>Does anyone remember what led to pmwiki adopting the '''bold''' and family 
>>>over the mime-like *bold* and family? Was it some sort of markup conflict, 
>>>like with the unordered lists and stuff?
>>>
>>>And then why use * for bullets rather than - (which is easier to type at 
>>>least on the US keyboard, and I keep seeing (and using) in text-only lists)
>>
>>Pm was probably just following the precedent set by other wikis at the
>>time.
> 
> No, it's a fair bit more than that.  The problem is that single asterisks 
> often show up in text where they aren't meant to mean "bold".  For example, 
> someone entering a mathematical formula would be more than a little 
> surprised when a = b*c + d*e  gets rendered as "a = b<b>c + d</b>e".  
> And there are other conflicts with single asterisks, which is why
> I just avoided it entirely.  (Similar comments hold for trying to
> do _underline_ text or /italic/.)

Mozilla does these markups just fine :-)

The rule seems to be: a non-alphabetic character to the left and an 
alphabetic one to the right starts the markup, and the reverse for 
end-of-markup.

This seems to work well in emails - with the exception of 
/absolute/directory/names/.

Are there any PmWiki markups that would conflict with *...*, _..._, and 
/.../?

Regards,
Jo



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