[Pmwiki-users] Idea for extension of special list syntax

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud
Fri Jan 21 15:09:05 CST 2005


On Fri, Jan 21, 2005 at 04:44:05PM -0500, Neil Herber wrote:
> At 2005-01-21  01:58 PM -0700, Patrick R. Michaud is rumored to have said:
> >> An other "feasible" new feature I'd like to have is to let ordered list
> >> markup handle an optional numeric argument giving the current item's list
> >> value, so the following markup:
> 
> Would it be possible to solve all of these weird and wonderful list nesting 
> and numbering problems by adding markup which performs almost exactly like 
> an unordered list but allows arbitrary items as the hanging indent?

This is a very interesting idea.  Unfortunately, HTML doesn't make it
easy to specify arbitrary bullets except as images -- the only way to
format this is to use tables.  (Something close could perhaps be done 
with the CSS "display:run-in" style, but not a lot of browsers 
support this yet.)

> Although this may not be intuitive, neither are lists with non-sequential 
> numbering. 

I'm pretty sure that the non-sequential numbering in the previous examples
were for demonstration of functionality,  not because people expect to write
a lot of non-sequentially numbered lists.  For example, the "#nn" markup 
makes it possible for an ordered list to be interrupted by another block 
markup or item and then restarted at the correct point.  For example,
right now the markup

    # Numbered list item
         some preformatted
         text here
    # Another list item
    # Yet another list item

will produce

    1. Numbered list item
          some preformatted
          text here
    1. Another list item
    2. Yet another list item

which is probably not what the author intended.  Being able to specify
"#2" for "Another list item" would make it easy to get the desired
1., 2., 3. indexing without having to abandon ordered lists altogether.

However, I suspect we can take a hint from W3C/HTML here and note that
even if we make it possible to set the index we're semantically getting 
the whole thing wrong generating two separate HTML ordered lists where 
in fact only one exists.  Which brings me back to the previous 
observation that it'd be really nice to have some clean way to place 
continued lines, paragraphs, and preformatted text into lists such
that they don't terminate the list.  Unfortunately I don't have the
solution there yet, and leading spaces continues to look like the
leading candidate.

Pm



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