A Modest Definition List Proposal

[David E. Wheeler]

On Feb 18, 2009, at 2:50 PM, Tom Humiston wrote:


> 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.


Yeah. I think ~~ would work okay, too, and gets around that problem.

  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

Although I think that it's a bit of a red herring.


> 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.)


I didn't see anyone suggest tilde for definitions in 2005, though I  
did notice that Aristotle tried it out for terms. I agree with him  
that tildes didn't work so well there. :-)

Best,

David