[pmwiki-users] leading space rule? what rule?

[christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com]

On Thu, 25 May 2006, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:

> On Thu, May 25, 2006 at 11:33:54PM +0200, christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com wrote:
>> On Thu, 25 May 2006, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
>>> On Thu, May 25, 2006 at 11:40:44AM +0200, christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com
>>>> FWIW, I also think it's a mixed blessing to let lines starting with space
>>>> result in preformatted text. I think the reason for this choice is mostly
>>>> historic and then it's just stuck around...
>>>
>>> Historic tradition does play a part here, but also using leading
>>> whitespace for preformatted text does tend to do the right thing for
>>> many applications.  If nothing else, a number of other wikis (including
>>> MediaWiki) use this particular convention, so it's worth keeping it.
>>
>> I just wonder if the other wikis have it for historic tradition ;-)
>
> Well, in PmWiki's case, historic tradition really was only a part
> of the basis for the decision.  I could've eliminated the
> whitespace=>preformatted rule in 2.0, but I decided that leading
> whitespace really ought to mean *something*, and the only logical
> candidates were preformatted text and indented blocks.
> (And in 2.1 leading whitespace is able to serve both purposes
> reasonably well!)

Indeed. In fact, I think the leading whitespace is excellent, and the fact 
that you can write something like

 	* bla bla
 	  * bla bla

and have it perfectly consistent is very nice!  Actually.. .maybe it's 
even easier to explain to new users to do the above for a second level 
bullet.

/C

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