[pmwiki-users] leading spaces switch for 2.2.0 (somewhat important)

Ben Wilson dausha at gmail.com
Mon Mar 26 10:02:23 CDT 2007


On 3/25/07, The Editor <editor at fast.st> wrote:
> On 3/25/07, Kathryn Andersen <kat_lists at katspace.homelinux.org> wrote:
> > I'm wondering if there could be a compromise: rather than having a
> > *single* leading space trigger preformatting, there could be a certain
> > number of leading spaces required, like four or eight. One or two spaces
> > are likely to be accidental, eight spaces, less so.
>
> This sparks a thought re: a recent post by Hans relating to a question
> of mine, copied below...
>
> I'm wondering if someone could suggest a markup that would enable
> someone to indent paragraphs, say perhaps
>
> >Paragragh...
>

I have to say this solution is unsavory for a couple of reasons. For
those looking at the "quoted" portion (delineated by '> '), you may
not notice that The Editor suggested using "> Paragraph" to symbolize
an indented paragraph. That markup is almost universally accepted as a
quote in discussion lists---so universal that Gmail automatically
quotes thus, as do other email clients. I'm assuming your suggesting
the first line indent, which (to my at least, and I admit I could
always be a minority) seems counter-intuitive.

I would offer an alternative, but probably because I don't like to put
too much power in the hands of authors. I fix the indentation based on
elements of web typography.[1] The first paragraph in a block is not
indented, but subsequent paragraphs are. I enforce this via CSS (e.g.
p + p { text-indent: 2em; }). I let authors focus on content and use
CSS to impose the style. Perhaps I've been affected by the Tex/LaTeX
school of authoring which essentially imposes style on an author
absent serious effort on the author's part. The heterogeneous nature
of multiple authors is minimized by homogeneous style.[2]

Ben

[1]: http://webtypography.net/toc/
[2]: I managed a major software development project with multiple
developers in Perl. We wrote over 250K SLOC, but imposed strict style
rules which avoided the negative impact of TIMTOWTDY. Maybe my
approach predates my use of Tex . . .

-- 
Ben Wilson
"Words are the only thing which will last forever" Churchill



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