list corner case

Aristotle Pagaltzis pagaltzis at gmx.de
Mon Sep 8 23:59:41 EDT 2008


* Waylan Limberg <waylan at gmail.com> [2008-09-08 17:15]:

> On Sun, Sep 7, 2008 at 10:14 PM, Aristotle Pagaltzis <pagaltzis at gmx.de> wrote:

>> Any inferred nesting would have to subordinate them to an implied

>> 3rd item in the surrounding unordered list that is not written

>> out in these examples – semantically equivalent roughly to this:

>>

>> - foo

>> - bar

>> -

>> 1. baz

>> 1. quux

>> - qux

>>

> Not necessarily. Take the following example (with 4 spaces

> before item "two"):

>

> - one

> 2. two

>

> With the exception of Maruku (which falls flat on it's face

> here), every implementation consistently renders this:

>

> <ul>

> <li>one <ol>

> <li>two</li>

> </ol>

> </li>

> </ul>

>

> While I hate to deflate any argument against option B, the fact is,

> there doesn't have to be any "implied 3rd item in the surrounding

> unordered list".


I am not sure where you have argued anything at all?

My entire point is that as a human reader I see the last item in
my example lists as really belonging to the same list as the
first two items, even though there’s another list in the middle.
I don’t think there’s any strong argument to be made that this is
not the case.

Actually I see *all* the items as belonging to the same list. The
two numbered ones just happen to have a relationship to each
other that the others don’t share.

But there is no way to express that in Markdown. Because there is
no way to express that in HTML. Lists can only be ordered or not
as a whole.

The example I gave with the implied 3rd item in the impliedly
outer list is just an attempt to convey roughly the same
semantics in HTML and Markdown as what I see, but it is not an
argument that this is how it should actually be rendered, since
it wasn’t written that way by the author.

The only available option in HTML, which is what Markdown should
do IMO, is simply render this as three distinct lists.


> However, without the indentation, I don't think it's clear to

> the casual reader that that should be a nested ordered list -

> which I've already discussed in my previous comment.


Honestly I don’t care. If you insist on more indentation for a
nested list, then imagine that I had used more indentation. It
doesn’t matter for the purpose of the argument.

Regards,
--
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>


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