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

[chr at home.se]

On Sun, 16 Oct 2005, Patrick R. Michaud 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?
> > 
> > This was why I wndered if it should be based on the list markup
> > length.
> 
> Excellent example -- clearly it's too ambiguous for us to use multiple
> column positions for indent level.  So, I think I'd fall back to wanting
> to indent to the same column as the list item.  Otherwise it just
> doesn't visually align for me at all (especially with several
> continuation paragraphs in a non-nested list).

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.

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*.

cheers
/Christian

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