ol start with a specific number?

[Aristotle Pagaltzis]

* Waylan Limberg <waylan at gmail.com> [2011-04-07 04:15]:

> I'm not opposed to adding this, but I noticed that no other

> implementation (of those on Babelmark) implements this by

> default (not counting Pandoc's extended mode). I haven't

> checked if other implementations offer this as an option.


John’s reason was that the `start` attribute was deprecated
in HTML 4 Strict. He has since said at least once that this
reasoning was flawed and the decision a mistake.


> My question is: should this be an option to turn on and off,

> and if so, should it be on or off by default?


Bitter as it may be I think you would need to leave it off by
default. Interoperability is important.


> Given that statement, it would seem that on by default and

> without an option to turn if off would be fine.


I wish John would make another release to straighten out these
handful of known tiny niggles… since his is the implementation
that everyone else’s will follow.


> But what is the reality in the real world? If I did that, would

> a bunch of documents suddenly start rendering incorrectly - or

> at least different that expected? I guess the real question is:

> has everyone been ignoring that piece of advice in the docs and

> if so, is this something we should care about as implementors?


It’s not that simple. Consider what happens if some user writes
a document while previewing it with your implementation, which
advertises itself as Markdown, then pastes it into the textarea
in some web app, which also advertises Markdown support.

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