Block quotes with a blank line between them get merged

Jacob Rus jrus at hcs.harvard.edu
Wed Oct 18 13:33:04 EDT 2006


A. Pagaltzis wrote:

> * Waylan Limberg <waylan at gmail.com> [2006-10-18 16:20]:

>> I considered suggesting some "force-end-of-block" marker, but

>> that just doesn't seem right.

>

> Maybe an considered-unindented less-than character?


I don't like this idea. I think that the two blank line (or three? why
three again?) convention would be perfectly fine. As a way to
explicitly continue a list (despite a few empty-looking lines), a user
could perhaps indent out to the level of the list. For instance

* This is a list item
* This is another list item

With some long and complex paragraphs


* We wanted two empty lines above to visually clear the way for
this third list item, which could otherwise look cluttered.

So our method was to explicitly add an indent to the blank
lines so that the list is continued.


* The nice thing about this method is that it's easy to
unambiguously parse the document. Any single blank lines
can essentially be ignored (though they end paragraphs),
but two newlines in a row with no spaces between can always
exit out of any block-level elements, back to the top level.

* This also seems to me to be perfectly consistent with the
official markdown specification.


* This is a new list, because the previous line did not continue
the indentation.

What do people think?

-Jacob



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