solderpunk solderpunk at SDF.ORG
Mon Jan 20 12:32:30 GMT 2020
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ``` On Mon, Jan 20, 2020 at 12:09:01PM +0000, James Tomasino wrote: > One could always cheat > and just use unordered lists and start each one with a number: > > * 1) item one! > * 2) A really long item two that will be wonderfully reflowed on small > screens by our awesome client writers. > ** 2a) I'm lookin' at you, Michael! > ** 2b) And the rest of you too. ;) > > Saves us a bit o' logic. Keeps everything line based. You could run a > stateless renderer on a stream now and it wouldn't choke. This has two other advantages, too. First, when processed by a simpleclient which opts not to treat list items as anything special, theresult is still obviously an ordered list. Under the + proposal, itwill look just like an unordered list whose author chose a differentbullet character for reasons of taste. Ambiguous degredation is notgraceful degredation! Second, authors can unambiguously refer back to a list item in laterwriting. I can say "Tomasino used a winky face in item 2b above" andyou can all go back and find 2b and confirm this. If I said that andyou were using a simple client that just rendered + and ++, it wouldbe up to you to mentally figure out which point was 2b. And even ifyou're using an advanced client that does render ordered lists, Imight write "2b" but your fancy client might use Roman numerals forsecond level lists and print 2ii instead of 2b, and again theconnection wouldn't be immediate. This could only be solved bytediously specifying that first level lists MUST use Arabic numerals,second level lists MUST use lowercase letters, third level lists MUSTuse Roman numerals, and so on and so on. And then what happens whensomebody uses more than 26 second level list items and we run out oflowercase letters to use? A spec that can avoid all these problems will be exactly the kind oflong, tedious, fiddly spec that I really don't want us to use, and whichnobody will want to code to anyway. I'm starting to think we shouldeither drop the ordered list idea, or at the very least strictly limitit to one level with no nesting. Cheers,Solderpunk