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

[Christian Ridderström]

On Tue, 3 Feb 2004, Reimer Behrends wrote:

> That tends to be a sore spot with me, mostly because I had to deal with
> too many Word documents where the authors were using blank lines to add
> inter-paragraph spacing. (Such a document is essentially unmaintainable,
> because the design decisions regarding spacing are not localized in a
> single place.)

You might want to check out LyX. It follows a "What You See Is What You 
Mean" paradigm instead of WYSIWYGI, and generally encourages you to 
separate content and layout. (It's "sort of" based on LaTeX though, 
although I don't know if that's still valid when exporting e.g. DocBook)

I can personally recommend LyX, having written all my papers and thesis 
using it since -97.

> Off the top of my head, I can't think of any source that advocates not
> visually separating lists from the surrounding paragraphs.

On-topic :-)  Personally, I *sometimes* want a vertical layout like this:

	This is sort of a list title:
	* item
	* item

	The next paragraph...

and the current default separation looks too big to me, but this is just a 
*sometimes* personal preference.

> > To me it's much nicer and more natural if vertical space appears only
> > where one was explicitly placed in the markup.
> 
> That is where we agree to disagree, I think. No offense meant by any of
> the above, just an explanation of a different position.

I guess I'm somewhere in the middle... in the best of all worlds I'd 
prefer separating content - markup, but that doesn't seem to work in 
practice when we want a simple system :-(

Oh well, now you got some more opinions ;-)

/Christian

-- 
Christian Ridderstr?m                           http://www.md.kth.se/~chr