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

chr@home.se chr
Sat Jan 22 10:08:25 CST 2005


On Sat, 22 Jan 2005, Neil Herber wrote:

> At 2005-01-22  04:29 PM +0100, chr at home.se is rumored to have said:
> >Howver, I think the ability to easily spot misalignment in practice
> >requires the lines to be consequitive. This means that the alignment
> >principle may not be practical for advanced examples with items that
> >continue on a different level. I assume this is what you were thinking of
> >Neil?
> 
> Christian
> 
> My concern was with some of the later examples (not yours) that had 4 or 5 
> levels with inset paragraphs and non-sequential numbering.

Yeah, I figured so but better safe than sorry.

> It seemed to me that we might be wasting a lot of valuable brain-power 
> trying to come up with a way of having PmWiki parse arbitrarily complex 
> lists when some kind of generic markup (like my plus-sign example) could 
> handle anything with only simple parsing required.
> 
> Patrick pointed out that there were no HTML constructs to create arbitrary 
> hanging indents for lists, but that just re-enforces my point - we are 
> asking PmWiki to do things that you can't even markup in HTML.

Umm... I thought it was just arbitrary 'text bullets' we couldn't do in 
HTML?

> My other point was that these complex nestings were probably very rare, and 
> spending a lots of time to accommodate them was a waste of effort. Authors 
> who valued such lists would find this an unreasonable stand.

I agree that they are probably not so rare, but I write stuff like
the following example quite often:

	# First you do... while adding this to config.php
		$a = 1;
	# Then reload the wiki page to see the result

which sould render as

	1. First you do... while adding this to config.php
		$a = 1;
	2. Then reload the wiki page to see the result

but I don't think neither of us consider this a complex case. (better safe 
than sorry etc).

> As for your examples, detecting alignment that uses spaces relies too much 
> on adjacency (as you noted) and on letter shapes. It's easy to align 
> consecutive Ls and Is, bit what about a T followed by an O? It took me 
> weeks to notice that there was a version of the [=..=] markup that had a 
> leading space. That is why I suggested a visible marker, such as >[=...=]. 
> Maybe my old eyes are not as sharp as your young ones? Have pity on us geezers!

I agree with you about the 'SPACE [=...=]', see my other post.

As for detecting a misalignment, I'm not sure if you mean for consequitive 
lines or not... I only find alignment difficult to see when there are 
non-aligned lines in between - not when all the lines should be aligned or 
not.
 
 Here's an example using the letters you mentioned:

       * This is an item with lots of text. 
	 bla dasf asf adsflad
	 Line starting with an L
	 In this line it starts with an I
	 This line starts with a T
	 On this line it starts with an O
	 Hmm.. what about a line with an H
	 bla dasf asf adsflad
	 Line starting with an L
	 In this line it starts with an I
	 This line starts with a T
	  On this line it starts with an O
	 Hmm.. what about a line with an H
	 bla dasf asf adsflad
	Line starting with an L
	 In this line it starts with an I
	 This line starts with a T
	On this line it starts with an O
	 Hmm.. what about a line with an H

Hmm... I'm not sure I'm so young (I recentely passed 31), but I don't find 
it too difficult to see the misaligned lines... and this is kind of a long 
example. Just to be on the safe side I tried pasting it into the edit form 
and that wasn't much of a problem either.

But I guess I could find this easy while others find it difficult... 

/Christian

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




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