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

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Mon Oct 17 02:28:33 CDT 2005


On Mon, Oct 17, 2005 at 09:03:17AM +0200, chr at home.se wrote:
> > On Mon, Oct 17, 2005 at 03:38:52PM +1300, John Rankin wrote:
> > > # An item
> > > ## A sub item
> > >   A continuation item
> > > 
> > > Is this A continuation item of An item or A sub item?
>  
> That is a very good example of an ambiguous situation. However, do we
> really want to use this markup to handle such advanced cases as inserting 
> a new paragraph to a previous item?  I'm not even sure how you can do this 
> today... For instance, this markup doesn't work:
> 	# Item 1.
> 	## Item 1.1 - a 2nd level item
> 	-> Continuation of item. 1
> 	# Item 2.
> 
> as illustrated here http://pmwiki.org/wiki/Test/Tjolahoppsan
> 
> So I think expecting to do something like the above with whitespace
> indentation is demanding a bit much. I also think what to do about the
> ambiguity in John's example is related to how we today can insert a
> contiuation parapgraph for item 1 without breaking the enumeration.

You're correct that it cannot be done easily with PmWiki's present
markup, the closest one can currently get is

    # Item 1
    ## Item 1.1 - a 2nd level item
    -> Continuation of item 1
    # %value=2% Item 2

> Without any knowledge of how you could do the above, I'd say that John's 
> example could well be interpreted as follows:
> 	# Item 1. - An item
> 	## Item 1.1 - A sub item
> 	  Continution of item 1.1
> with the motivation that the whitespace indentation is only meant to make 
> it easier to continue the object *just* *before*.

Except that limiting things to *just before* still doesn't give
the author a good way to solve his/her problem.  I don't see too
much of a problem with continuing to beforehand things -- to avoid
ambiguity an author could always write:

    # Item 1. - An item
      # Item 1.1 - a sub item
      Continuation of item 1

Or increase the number of spaces involved:

    # Item 1. - An item
    ##  Item 1.1 - a sub item
      Continuation of item 1

At any rate, this is a case where I think we don't need to explain
every possible markup combination to every author.  Instead, we
simply say that to place additional paragraphs in a list the author
aligns the first character of the paragraphs with the list item's
text.  Most people will initially think about it in the simple context
(i.e., align with the previous list item), and then when they get to
the situation where they want to align with a list item before the
previous one they'll try the obvious thing and it'll just work.

Pm




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