Ordered list syntax.

[Daniel Axelrod]

On Thursday, March 25, 2004, at 06:08  PM, John Gruber wrote:
> What if we change the rule so that you must use at least 2 spaces
> after the dot, *if* you really want to make a one-item list:
snip
> On the one hand, this would solve the ambiguity.
> On the other hand, it's not exactly intuitive.

No offense, but eeewww. Worse, though, there *are* still people who put 
two spaces after each period. I know too many of them to assume that 
this isn't a widespread problem. It's not even that they used to use 
typewriters. It's just that whoever taught them to type did. (Of 
course, it doesn't matter normally in HTML, because whitespace is 
condensed to just one space.) This rule would still trigger in the 
wrong place for them.

Once you start relying on the number of spaces between things, I'm not 
sure how much you diverge from easily readable syntax.

On second thought, a human can determine whether something is a list 
item from context. Also, you already use two spaces at the end of a 
line to indicate a literal line break, so maybe this is consistent with 
other Markdown syntax.


> We want two things:
>
> 1.  To make it hard to accidentally trigger a list.
> 2.  To make it possible to create a single-item list.

Sorry, but why do you want to make it possible to create a single item 
list? Is there really any need for one? I don't think I can remember 
ever seeing someone create a list with one item.

Remember, people can always drop back down into HTML if they need to.

---

On a somewhat unrelated note, thank you so much for giving us the 
opportunity to give you suggestions and help develop Markdown.

-Daniel Axelrod