A Modest Definition List Proposal

[Aristotle Pagaltzis]

* David E. Wheeler <david at kineticode.com> [2009-02-19 00:00]:

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


I don’t know. John has stated that one of his rules when making
design decisions is how likely it is that users will trigger a
particular interpretation accidentally when they *don’t* want it.
Another is how likely is it that they will choose this construct
when writing in plaintext outside of a pre-assumed context that
the document is Markdown.

The tilde doesn’t seem any more likely to be chosen independently
than the colon-based syntaxes, and seems significantly more
likely to be used for other meanings.

I don’t want to be down on your proposal or anything – it really
looks a whole lot nicer to a reader of the plaintext version.

But I think it is a significantly more problematic choice when
considering marginally-proficient (or in the context of something
like weblog comments, possibly entirely unaware!) writers of
Markdown.

Thorny problem. :-(

Regards,
-- 
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>