Data loss issue: Adjacent List Types

[David Parsons]

On Jun 7, 2011, at 9:01 AM, Már Örlygsson wrote:

>

> I've also often been irritated by the limitation that all <ol> lists

> have to start on 1.

> and that the a,b.c... and A,B,C... list types aren't supported at all.

>

> Those are bugs - because they show behavior that a normal user does  

> not expect.


   The list numbering behavior is documented, so it's not a bug;
it may not be the most coherent behavior, but it's behaving in
the way you'd expect it to after reading the syntax documentation.

   On the other hand, it's also explicitly documented that "future
versions" may attempt to carry the list numbers out into the html,
so that's a very obvious roadsign for future implementations (though
it does leave some questions, like "do you only care about the first
number, or do you want every number to follow?" -- I've got some lists
that are cut and pasted from multiple sources that have duplicate
numbers, and I expect that they'll renumber automatically instead
of having to carefully reorder them after adding or striking a list
item.   A scheme where "starting # != 1 means to carry the numbers
through" would solve that problem, but at the cost of being insanely
confusing to people who expect one behavior or the other :-)

    -david parsons