Unordered lists

[John Gruber]

Michel Fortin <michel.fortin at michelf.com> wrote on 11/15/05 at 7:17 AM:


> Not all UTF-8 files have a BOM, in fact most of them on my computer  

> don't have it. And I wouldn't count snippets of text from a content  

> management system to add a BOM either.


Yeah, internal to a CMS, you generally have to make assumptions
about text encoding.



> Event if UTF-8 was detectable, it would make a feature (the bullet)  

> that work sometime and don't work at other times. Many people don't  

> have a clue about what is character encoding, so when it won't work  

> on their weblog they will have no idea why and will get frustrated or  

> complain about a "bug".


I agree that most people have no idea what a text encoding is, but
I'd also argue that most people have no idea how to type a bullet.
Especially Windows users.

My thinking is that UTF-8 punctuation characters could be supported
with little risk of confusion. If you want to use non-ASCII
characters in your Markdown input, you must use UTF-8; if you don't
know what UTF-8 is, or don't care, then don't use them. If you try
to use them and they don't work, then your publishing system isn't
using UTF-8.

It just seems unfair to people who do use UTF-8, and do know how to
type a bullet, that something like this:

    • This
    • That
    • The other

which is quite obviously an unordered list, isn't recognized as such.

-J.G.