evolving the spec (was: forking Markdown.pl?)

[Joseph Lorenzo Hall]

On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 8:52 AM, Thomas Nichols <nichols7 at googlemail.com> wrote:

>

>  Having a spec/ruleset/syntax definition seems an admirable goal; does

>  this necessarily imply that, for example, you should not be able to

>  begin a list item with zero to three spaces, at your discretion? This

>  seems rather at odds with the overall theme of your mail, with which I

>  heartily agree.


As a slightly-OT aside, there's another view on this "spaces before a
list item" issue that sees it as a bug.

When I write a list of references in a academic paper, I do so with
list items.  I do a hanging indent where the rest of the reference is
indented by two or three spaces, like so:

* Aslam, J. A., Popa, R. A., & Rivest, R. L. (2007). On estimating the
  size and confidence of a statistical audit, USENIX/ACCURATE
  Electronic Voting Technology Workshop 2007. Retrieved February 24,
  2008. from
  <http://www.usenix.org/events/evt07/tech/full_papers/aslam/aslam.pdf>.

Markdown sees that "  2008." as a list item.

    <ul>
    <li>Aslam, J. A., Popa, R. A., &amp; Rivest, R. L. (2007). On estimating the
    size and confidence of a statistical audit, USENIX/ACCURATE
    Electronic Voting Technology Workshop 2007. Retrieved February 24,
    <ol><li>from
    <a href="http://www.usenix.org/events/evt07/tech/full_papers/aslam/aslam.pdf">http://www.usenix.org/events/evt07/tech/full_papers/aslam/aslam.pdf</a>.</li></ol></li>
    </ul>

best, Joe

-- 
Joseph Lorenzo Hall
UC Berkeley School of Information
http://josephhall.org/