(Nick Reinking nick@twoevils.org):
Anyways, what I want to clarify. To me, when my mind encounters '' or ''', it thinks, "Ooo! Quotation marks that make stuff bold!". My mind is used to closing quotation marks, so I guess that's why it makes the most sense for them to span multiple lines until they are closed. I'm not sure how quotes work in a lot of other languages, but I know they're closed in Japanese much the same way (but with different symbols than quotation marks).
That's not to say that stopping them at the end of a line is a bad idea
- I'm sure it helps a lot to prevent new users from making a bad
mistake, seeing a messed up page, and giving up.
In the end, I'm writing a new parser for Wikipedia, not for myself. If everybody thinks it should end at newlines, I can make it do that, and that will be that. :)
There are other reasons to kill them at line-ends. Primarily, the block-level elements like lists and <p>s and <pre>s are defined by the first character of each line; allowing '' to span lines would require that we close and re-open them at paragraph boundaries to stay valid HTML, and that's complicated and error-prone. Second, just /defining/ proper behavior requires specifying some maximum scope; otherwise, things like '' a ''' b '' c ''' d '' ... will just stack up without closing. If we define them to close at line-end (and I'd further define them to stack at most two levels), then they're easier to cleanly specify.