Data loss issue: Adjacent List Types

[Alan Hogan]

Quoth _Lasar: 


> while I agree that this is technically an issue, I don't think it

> is an often seen issue in actual human-written text. Markdown is

> plain text formatted by and for humans. I don't think there are

> many cases where you would want to put two lists after each other

> without an introduction of sorts.




I must of course agree that it is not an exceedingly common case, or a terribly sensible decision to make.

That said:

Consider a student quickly taking notes, or a liveblogger publishing quickly. They may not have time to write an intro for each list, or realize that they skipped it…
I personally have experienced this issue, so it does happen.
Even if a small fraction of users run into this issue — half a percent, say — if I am providing a service to two hundred thousand of users (and I do), that’s a thousand people affected.





> And on a side note: Gruber notes in the markdown spec that the

> actual numbers used in a numbered list are ignored. So data loss

> is already occuring here.



Now that is true.

However:

Existing data loss doesn’t mean we should be okay with more data loss.
The numbers couldn’t really be always matched in output given how HTML works, anyway…
I personally made a mistake by starting a paragraph with “1999.” today, so this too can cause problems. (At least it’s part of the Markdown spec though.)
I am personally disappointed that the `start` attribute (?) isn’t used, based off the first number in the list; this would also help catch mistakes.



Given that I still struggle to see a downside to making my proposed change, I’m really hoping we can achieve a rough consensus here.





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