On Tue, Nov 13, 2007 at 12:29:42AM +1100, Steve Bennett wrote:
On 11/12/07, Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com wrote:
The common solution to Tradenames with silly spelling or rendering is to do your best once, and then ignore them for the rest of the article, IME.
Yes, well I cheated anyway. It's usually spelt JetStar. The programming language Brainf*ck suddenly comes to mind though...
[[Brainfuck]] strongly suggests, though not saying it outright, that that's not the formal name of the language. That page *does* seem to need the technical limitations tag, though.
And 2**5 (exponentiation() is a potential problem as well, yes.
Sure. But that kind of sequence is really only likely to occur when quoting programming source, which pretty much has to be nowiki'ed by definition.
Exactly.
Any in-band approach will have this problem; the trick is to choose a token that reduces it to an acceptable level -- where by "acceptable" I mean "causes fewer problems in the Real World than What We Have Now".
Yeah. I think ** and // will do a lot better than ''' and ''.
The Neapolitans will certainly think so -- and that's an excellent point: we're currently appropriating a character sequence *which is a valid punctuation character in a non-pictographic language which we serve* as a markup sequence.
**Melbourne** is a great city.
**This is a list.
Well, an unadorned second level list item renders poorly just now anyway, right?
Yes, but I don't like the way you're thinking. If you're thinking that the parser should render this:
**This** is bold
whereas
*Foo **This** is the word This followed by two asterisks...
Well...let's not do that. This might be an acceptable disambiguation rule:
**This** is always bold because there is no space.
** This** is a second-level list because there is a space.
Again: I would be perfectly comfortable ruling that "list markup *must* be followed by whitespace.
IE: <nl>**<sp>item
Then again, why not just make the rule that it's *always* bold:
**This** is bold.
**This<nowiki>**</nowiki> is a second-level list.
That's what people will do anyway when they see the problem. It definitely could arise, if the ** is some sort of footnotey thing, but it's going to be pretty rare.
That's consonant with my thinking.
That's not "spelling". That's "rendering", and a policy decision has to be taken as to how much of that is required to be representable.
Yeah, but let's not even think about Wikipedia policy yet. Keep it technical...
I'm trying, Steve. :-)
Cheers, -- jra