On Mar 2, 2008, at 11:56 AM, Joseph Lorenzo Hall wrote:

Sounds like there are quite a few people who write intuitively by
placing a space or two before a list marker.  Next question: what if
we only allowed a fixed number of whitespaces before a list marker?
For example, what if the spec said 0-1 whitespace characters before a
list marker?

Is that too rigid?


Tightening up indentation rules is definitely a breaking change, and I don't see any payoff for users here. If anything, we should be making indentation rules more lenient.

I made a suggestion about indentation last July: <http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/markdown-discuss/2007-July/000690.html > My idea is to consider a list item to be a child of the most recent list item whose bullet is indented less than its own. If there's no such parent, then the item is part of a top-level list. It's harder to parse than a two-space rule, but that's our problem as implementors.

Anyway, this whole discussion of spaces and bullets is a good preview of the spec-writing process: we'll go back and forth for days, and end up with English-language pseudocode that nobody can follow without pen and paper.

+1 for something formal-grammar-y.

John Fraser
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