On Feb 18, 2009, at 3:40 PM, Aristotle Pagaltzis wrote:
* David E. Wheeler <[email protected]> [2009-02-19 00:00]:
Although I think that it's a bit of a red herring.
I don’t know. John has stated that one of his rules when making
design decisions is how likely it is that users will trigger a
particular interpretation accidentally when they *don’t* want it.
Another is how likely is it that they will choose this construct
when writing in plaintext outside of a pre-assumed context that
the document is Markdown.
Right. I actually think that using ~ as a range operator (essentially)
is fairly rare outside of electronic circles, at least in US English.
The tilde doesn’t seem any more likely to be chosen independently
than the colon-based syntaxes, and seems significantly more
likely to be used for other meanings.
Hrm. I disagree. It's pretty rare outside of personal URLs, IME. And
it's a very nice bullet character, not unlike -.
I don’t want to be down on your proposal or anything – it really
looks a whole lot nicer to a reader of the plaintext version.
Thanks!
But I think it is a significantly more problematic choice when
considering marginally-proficient (or in the context of something
like weblog comments, possibly entirely unaware!) writers of
Markdown.
Thorny problem. :-(
I don't think it's too problematic, as tildes are pretty rare.
However, one other thing I did play around with, since really I was
just looking for a much better character than “:” to use as a bullet,
was an old friend, “o”:
Term 1:
o This is a definition with two paragraphs. Lorem ipsum
dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aliquam
hendrerit mi posuere lectus.
Vestibulum enim wisi, viverra nec, fringilla in, laoreet
vitae, risus.
o Second definition for term 1, also wrapped in a paragraph
because of the blank line preceding it.
Term 2:
o This definition has a code block, a blockquote and a list.
code block.
> block quote
> on two lines.
1. first list item
2. second list item
I still prefer ~, as it's more distinctive and offers more useful
mnemonics, but I think that o might get around the issues you raise.
Still, it looks pretty crappy in the single-line syntax, as it's not
really a separator in the same way that ~ is:
Term 1 o Definition a blah blah blah blah blah
Term 2 o Definition b foo bar baz
Term 3 o Definition c even more blah blah blah
Thanks for your comments.
Best,
David
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