A Modest Definition List Proposal

[Tom Humiston]

A problem I see with your suggestion about not including newlines is  
that interpreting the form "xxx ~ yyy" as a DT/DD pair precludes the  
use of " ~ " (space-tilde-space) in some other ways it's likely to be  
used ~ for instance, as an alternative to the plain hyphen.

I also suppose that's why the suggestion in 2005 was for double  
colons. Colon-newline seems pretty clear, if anything is. (Mind you, I  
am NOT involved in writing implementations whatsoever; I'm just  
watching the mailing list.)

Tom Humiston


On 18 Feb 2009, at 4:46 PM, David E. Wheeler wrote:


> On Jul 27, 2005, at 7:33 AM, John Gruber wrote:

>

>> And since the ones with multiple terms and/or definitions are the

>> exception, not the norm, I think in the common cases, you'd wind up

>> with something that looks like this:

>>

>>  Term 1:: Definition a blah blah blah blah blah

>>  Term 2:: Definition b foo bar baz

>>  Term 3:: Definition c even more blah blah blah

>

> Was this ever implemented? I haven't noticed it in the documentation  

> for PHP Markdown Extra or MultiMarkdown.

>

> I think that, using the tilde as I've suggested in this thread, this  

> can be even better:

>

>  Term 1 ~ Definition a blah blah blah blah blah

>  Term 2 ~ Definition b foo bar baz

>  Term 3 ~ Definition c even more blah blah blah

>

> Basically, it's the same rule, only you don't have to have a newline  

> before the definition starts. Also, the single ~ is a little less  

> “unnatural” looking than the double : (and I say that as a Perl  

> hacker, so I'm used to “::”!).

>

> Best,

>

> David