On Thu, Feb 15, 2007 at 06:08:11PM +0100, Daniel Arnold wrote:
Another point is that * syntax clashes with lists. Lists with * are a really intuitive thing. Do not mix them with something else (for example what about italic in a list, something I really use often). Something like ** [space] * is not going to work. Never.
I keep hearing this asserted, but with nothing other than personal, anecdotal opinions as evidence.
My personal perception is that I don't expect
* This is an element ** This is a second level *element with a bold phrase* ** *This is another second level element, all bold* * One more element
to be at all difficult for people to cope with. The lists I see marked up in my limited work on en.W seem to go about 60/40 having the space.
Anyone with the full corpus on a machine who can check that statistic for real?
And, why is is to difficult, Daniel, for people to have to put a space in after a list item marker? That seems much less ambiguous than
'''''this is'' a weird phrase''' '''''this one''' is too''
to *me*. In list markup, it's reasonable to eat the whitespace character, which it is *not* reasonable for a parser to do in the bold/italics collision case.
Cheers, -- jra