on the philosophical aspects of a specification

[John Fraser]

On Mar 4, 2008, at 11:09 PM, Michel Fortin wrote:

> Yeah, the list implementation in Markdown.pl and PHP Markdown  

> doesn't follow the at all the little of a spec we have now. I've  

> been thinking about rewriting the list parser in PHP Markdown, but  

> I'm wondering what to do to not suddenly change a myriad of  

> documents which may depends on some part of this behaviour, such as:

>

>    * item

>      * subitem

>      * subitem

>    * item

>      * subitem

>

> (Here, no item is indented by four space, should this be a flat list?)

>

> I know people have written lists like the above in their document.  

> They did it because it produce what they expect in their Markdown  

> implementation, because the thing is readable and make sense, and  

> because didn't bother to read the spec.


A list item's parent is the most recent list item whose bullet is  
indented less than its own.  If there's no such parent, then the item  
belongs to a root-level list.

http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/markdown-discuss/2008-March/001076.html

Is there any case where this doesn't do the right thing?