A Modest Definition List Proposal

Waylan Limberg waylan at gmail.com
Wed Feb 18 15:19:23 EST 2009


On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 1:44 PM, David E. Wheeler <david at kineticode.com> wrote:
[snip]

>

> In a nutshell, I embrace the PHP Markdown Extra syntax, with one change: I

> would like to see the colon replaced with a tilde (for backwards

> compatibility, both should be supported). That means that a simple

> definition list would look like this:

>

[snip]

> Comments? Has this ship already sailed?


You make a convincing argument. And I must admit your proposal is very
nice to look at/read/write. But if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

The current implementation was set before I came along some few years
ago, and I have never searched through the archives to see how it came
about or why. But, people have been using it for this long without
issue and there are already numerous existing documents out there that
use it, so I see no reason to change it. In fact that last point
(numerous existing documents) seems to be the de-facto response to any
suggested changes on this list - and understandably so. No doubt
that's why you suggested leaving the existing syntax in place, but
then we would have two ways to define deflists. What happens when an
author mixes the two? Ack! Yeah, this ship has sailed IMO.

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Waylan Limberg


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