A. Pagaltzis wrote:
* John Gruber <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2006-10-19 06:35]:
I'd rather have line prefixes. I know they're harder to
generate in textarea fields, because you have to do them by
hand, but I'm finding it harder and harder to care about the
plight of the textarea-field-writer.
~ function db_like($first, $pattern) {
[...]
I find those Aesthetically highly offensive.
I would suggest pipes, which I've seen used in the wild, although
I guess those might clash with a potential future table markup.
Other options with some precedent include hash marks and percent
signs; both are markers for single-line comments in some
languages, so code blocks prefixed with them is not an uncommon
sight. Of those I'd favour the percent sign, because while it has
much less precedent, the hash mark looks very heavy.
Can it be explained again why we need to have this explicit character at
the beginning of lines? Is there some particular case of block quotes
for which markdown isn't perfectly sufficient right now? This seems to
me like change for change's sake, without sufficient justification.
One final thing: In code and other preformatted text, whitespace is
significant. The current rules allow us to figure out exactly where the
beginning of the line is, so that any space character added beyond that
becomes part of the code block. In this new system, where every line
begins with, for example, a `~` character, how many spaces will be
stripped after the `~`? Any choice made here will be arbitrary, and
will disagree with the way some number of people write the other types
of blocks, such as block quotations. So if I write:
code block:
~ this is a block of code
~ starting with tildes
will that be interpreted differently than:
code block:
~ this is a block of code
~ starting with tildes
or:
code block:
~ this is a block of code
~ starting with tildes
or:
code block:
~this is a block of code
~starting with tildes
If we replace `~` with `>`, these would all be interpreted as identical
block quotations. With this new rule, a choice will need to be made
which steps on someone's toes. And as far as I can tell, for no
particular reason.
-Jacob
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