[pmwiki-users] Re: Some experiments with whitespace indentation

chr at home.se chr at home.se
Mon Oct 17 01:52:42 CDT 2005


On Sun, 16 Oct 2005, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:

>     ::term: definition
>       continued text
> 
> I thought about aligning with the definition, but that seemed like too
> much indent.

For what it's worth, when I wrote definition lists I've so far written 
them as follows

	:term: defintion \
	  continued text of definition

i.e. used two spaces. The number of two spaces here was actually quite
arbitrary.... I'd be perfectly fine with the following

	:term: definition
	 continued text of definition, but I like the next example even
	 better :-)

	: term: definition
	  continued text of definition - this looks good to me

	::term:definition
	  continued text of 2nd level definition

	:: term: definition
	   continued text of 2nd level definition

Anyway, Patrick, my primary reason for this post is to say *thanks* for 
writing this :-) :-) :-) 

I know that I've earlier offered to document this feature, so if there's 
no objections I'm volunteering to do so. With just a little bit of luck, 
I'll be able to do this in a few days. 

> > 3. What's the rationale for choosing spaces at the start 
> >    of a line over continuation markup at the end of the 
> >    previous line?
> 
> A1: It's what authors tend to naturally.  In fact, look at how 
> you indented the text under the "1." and "3." in the questions 
> you sent in the email... :-)
> 
> A2: The markup ends up looking like the resulting output.

Very succintly put.

> > 5. Just an observation -- matching the exact number of spaces
> >    seems a bit fragile; for example this is incorrect:
> > 
> > #an item
> >   its continuation paragraph
> > 
> > # another item
> >   its continuation
> > 
> ... I think that an author looking at your incorrect example would
> naturally expect it to not be a continuation

I'd alos not expect a continuation in the first item. However, authors are
obviously different persons and have very different backgrounds so we
shouldn't make to many assumptions.

How about if this function is released under a *beta* label for some time
in order for authors to get a feel for it?  The important thing about the
beta aspect would be that authors need to know that details of the
syntax/semantics might change.

regards
/Christian

-- 
Christian Ridderström, +46-8-768 39 44               http://www.md.kth.se/~chr






More information about the pmwiki-users mailing list