on the philosophical aspects of a specification

[david parsons]

In article <DA0F6FC9-95D9-47C6-A970-6ACC0A6FD91B at attacklab.net>,
John Fraser  <markdown-discuss at six.pairlist.net> wrote:

>

>On Mar 5, 2008, at 2:38 PM, david parsons wrote:

>>   When I write a really long list,

>>

>>    *  sometimes, after a particularly long and

>>       detailed list item, I'll lose track of the

>>       exact indentation and

>>     * add one too many spaces to the leading

>>       indent.

>>

>>    so it would be bad if that broke nesting.

>

>Good point.  But Markdown's indentation rules are a mess,


    They are?   I find some of the blocking rules somewhat infuriating
    (that paragraphs are greedier at root level than they are inside
    a list or quote) but a 4-space indent seems quite natural to me.

    The attempts to reform list indentation by restricting the definition
    of a list item seem like they'd cause more of a mess than they would
    otherwise.    I use lists all over the place, and I don't really want
    to have to go back in and correct them all because a v2 spec corrected
    markdown to the point where previously correct markup became incorrect.
    (I get to deal with that all the time with gcc and their flexible 
    interpretation of the C programming language; I don't want to do it
    with things I do for fun, not money.)


    -david parsons