On Thu, May 08, 2003 at 01:07:19AM -0500, John R. Owens wrote:
As far as the \n closing, I can change it to behave like that, although it seems clearer to me if it continues to span lines (ala HTML). It doesn't bother me either way (other than a bit more coding). Do a lot of people not close their ''/'''/'''''s?
Wiki syntax is a line-based syntax. There is /no/ wiki markup that spans lines. It makes editing much simpler: if you make a mistake and forget to close something, it gets closed off quickly. HTML is not designed to be human-editable; wiki syntax is.
Not that that's not enough, but of course, lines (that don't continue on the next one without a *, :, etc.) are also enclosed by (unclosed! grr)
<p> tags, and you can't put a <em> in the middle of a <p> and close it after the next <p> and call it good HTML.
A couple things... I guess I don't see it as being too difficult or too complicated for users to understand that you need to enclose text you want to place emphasis on with '''. I know that stopping at newlines prevents an entire article from being emphasized, but it also prevents users from having large sections of emphasized text (without putting emphasis marks on every line). The Howto page certainly makes it look like you have to enclose your text, and in all the pages I've edited, I've never come across a page that leaves open emphasis marks.
Also, there are lots of line spanning constructs in wikitext. <pre>, <nowiki>, <tr>, <td>, etc. Now, I _know_ that (with the exception of <nowiki>) that these are HTML constructs (and not Wikitext constructs), but to the average user, they are exactly the same. So, some things span multiple lines, and some things don't. I think that is confusing.