On 2/1/08, Jim Wilson wilson.jim.r@gmail.com wrote:
In that example, there are non-whitespace characters between the two colons, whereas in my example, it was just whitespace.
So I guess my question is, why should newline be special? That is, why would these two examples render differently:
;Term: : Definition
;Term: : Definition
It's hard for me to argue "why" because personally I think the ;term:definition syntax is pretty crappy. It's the sort of cutesy minimalist syntax that was in vogue when wikis were first invented, but no one would dream of it now. I (and perhaps many people) tend to look at it like this:
;term
(translates into a DT wrapped in a DL)
:definition
(translates into a DD wrapped in a DL)
;term :definition
(translates as above, except that they're wrapped in the same DL, much like two consecutive #'s or *'s)
;term:definition
Now *this* is the special case, IMHO. Asking why the newline is special is missing the point: newline is always special. Or rather:
*Newline is :always special
So actually the newline is just behaving as it always does: breaking the end of a list item. It's the colon which has the weird double behaviour: acting as both a newline and list item in one. Personally, I don't see much benefit from this.
In any case, getting back to the original question re: doubled colons. I've looked through my corpus (versity, source, books, quotes) and find extremely few instances of that:
; CVS Archive : :pserver:anoncvs@libre.adacore.com:/anoncvs/xmlada ; Covalent – directional: : Covalent bonds are between specific atoms and distorting the positions of the atoms will break the bonds.
I think you're right that these are probably intended to trail on the term line, but it doesn't look like a big issue.
Steve