spaces and newlines before list markers (was: evolving the spec)

[John Fraser]

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