[pmwiki-users] historical question

[Patrick R. Michaud]

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/.)

Part of the trick to choosing good markup is to choose something 
that's relatively easy to type, easy to remember, and that isn't 
likely to occur with some other meaning in normal text.  *That
really doesn't work for asterisks, unfortunately.*

I should also point out that PmWiki's '''text''' markup isn't 
"bold", it's "strong", which can actually render in a variety of ways
depending on the output device.  It doesn't have to be a bold font.

And as far as the choice of '*' over '-' for bullets:
 * when displayed on a browser, bullets look more like asterisks than '-'
 * the hyphen is too useful in too many other markups to reserve it for
   bullet lists; consider horizontal rules (----), indent (-->), 
   outdent (--<), and even plain signatures (--Pm).

Pm