Data loss issue: Adjacent List Types

[David Chambers]

Alan Hogan <contact at alanhogan.com> wrote:

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.



+1

David


On 6 June 2011 11:26, Alan Hogan <contact at alanhogan.com> wrote:


> 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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