A Modest Definition List Proposal

[David E. Wheeler]

On Feb 18, 2009, at 12:19 PM, Waylan Limberg wrote:


>> Comments? Has this ship already sailed?

>

> You make a convincing argument. And I must admit your proposal is very

> nice to look at/read/write.


Thank you.


> But if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

>

> The current implementation was set before I came along some few years

> ago, and I have never searched through the archives to see how it came

> about or why. But, people have been using it for this long without

> issue and there are already numerous existing documents out there that

> use it, so I see no reason to change it. In fact that last point

> (numerous existing documents) seems to be the de-facto response to any

> suggested changes on this list - and understandably so. No doubt

> that's why you suggested leaving the existing syntax in place, but

> then we would have two ways to define deflists. What happens when an

> author mixes the two? Ack! Yeah, this ship has sailed IMO.


I don't think it's a problem to have two different kinds of bullets  
for definition list items; after all, you can already use +, -, or *  
for unordered lists. And you can mix them without penalty, so the same  
would be true here.

FWIW, the change to MultiMarkdown.pl to make this work would just be  
this:

--- bin/MultiMarkdown.pl.orig	2008-01-18 15:08:43.000000000 -0800
+++ bin/MultiMarkdown.pl	2009-02-18 12:28:47.000000000 -0800
@@ -2559,7 +2559,7 @@
  	
  	my $definition = qr{
  		\n?[ ]{0,$less_than_tab}
-		\:[ \t]+(.*?)\n
+		[:~][ \t]+(.*?)\n
  		((?=\n*[ ]{0,$less_than_tab}\S)|\n\n|\Z)	# Lookahead for non-space  
at line-start,
  		 										# two returns, or end of doc
  	}sx;

Plus documentation, of course. Doesn't get much simpler than that.

Thanks for your reply.

Best,

David