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| Take a look at how the [[HyphenListMarkupProposalWorks]], it is a proof of concept page for demonstration purposes. |
| ----------- |
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| Considering the facts behind 25% of list items on Wikipedia not using space after the star **and** 25% of lists have items starting with italics or bold[1], this combination is not an [[EdgeCase]]. This means that proposals like [[RequireSpaceAfterBulletProposal]] would make it more difficult to use Creole than necessary. Proposals like this are a sign that something in the design is wrong and accepting this probosal would only cure a symptom. That's why we ask the comunity to accept this new proposal to switch back to the original design on using hyphens for unnumbered lists. |
| Considering the facts behind 25% of list items on Wikipedia not using space after the star **and** 25% of lists have items starting with italics or bold[1], this combination is not an [[EdgeCase]]. This means that proposals like [[RequireSpaceAfterBulletProposal]] would make it more difficult to use Creole than necessary. Proposals like this are a sign that something in the design is wrong and accepting this proposal would only cure a symptom. That's why we ask the comunity to accept this new proposal to switch back to the original design on using hyphens for unnumbered lists. |
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| ** common use of double-hyphen to indicate m-dash in text, although this is not really a disadvantage because m-dashes are **never** used at the beginning of a line of text. (there's a distinction between [[hyphens and dashes]]) |
| ** common use of double-hyphen to indicate m-dash in text, although this is not really a disadvantage because m-dashes are __never__ used at the beginning of a line of text. (there's a distinction between [[hyphens and dashes]]) |
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| * usually the first guess of endusers, (look into your mailbox for the usage of lists, see [[Line Break Case Studies]]) |
| * usually the first guess of end users, (look into your mailbox for the usage of lists, see [[Line Break Case Studies]]) |
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| In the following section we will show solutions for the abiguities already discussed on the [[Talk.Lists]] page involved with hyphens. Opposed to the //bold as the first formatting in a list item//, we consider these combinations as root for ambiguities as [[EdgeCases]]. |
| In the following section we will show solutions for the ambiguities already discussed on the [[Talk.Lists]] page involved with hyphens. Opposed to the //bold as the first formatting in a list item//, we consider these combinations as root for ambiguities as [[EdgeCases]]. |
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| In general a unnumbered list alway has to start with **one** hyphen. |
| In general an unnumbered list alway has to start with **one** hyphen. |
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| a equal sign as the first character. While we do not loose a word about the headings so far there has been |
| an equal sign as the first character. While we do not lose a word about the headings so far there has been |
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| If we would use space as a escape character we would not be able to allow space in front of lists for example anymore. |
| If we would use space as an escape character we would not be able to allow space in front of lists for example anymore. |
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| == Remaining Problems Identified in Discussions |
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| [#1] For reference, [[RadomirDopieralski]] wrote the following on [[Talk.Require Space After Bullet Proposal]] on 2007-02-09: |
| === Hard line breaks |
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| I did a little experiment: I downloaded the backup of the english wikipedia's all pages, and looked at the percentages of both styles of 1st level lists in them. Unfortunately, I was able to only extract about 6.3GB of text, as I ran out of disk space. Anyways, I hope that the sampling is not biased because of that. |
| A hard line break is a line break that is saved explicitly in the text by putting in a line break character, that is not visible to human readers, but will be used by parsers. A human user inserts this invisible character when he hits return. Some Software products also might insert hard line breaks when they wrap the line, see [[Hard Line Breaks]] for a list. |
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| In the sample I checked there are {{{1 763 983}}} first level list items with a letter (a-z, A-Z, 0-9) immediately following the asterisk. The average length of these items is 90.2 characters or 12.3 words. 80% of them didn't have a space in front of the bullet too. |
| The [[ListMarkupLinebreakArgument]] shows that there remains the issue that users, and worse, software, might do hard line breaks before hyphens. This is not a problem special to list markup with hyphens, this also affects all other markup characters that indicate special meaning at the beginning of a line. |
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| There are {{{4 863 709}}} first level list items with a space or tab immediately after the asterisk. The average length of them is 81 characters or 10 words. |
| {{{ |
| **START** I think these are realistic examples |
| - either using simple hyphens as here - or the |
| -- much nicer -- n/m-dash way of writing. |
| And the minus sign (like |
| -1) even must be placed there. Finally, whereas |
| in English only trailing hyphen-constructs like |
| sub- and superclass are common, in German also |
| leading hyphen-constructs occur, e.g. subclass and |
| -property. **END** |
| }}} |
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| There are also {{{5 381 592}}} first level list items with neither a space or a letter right after the bullet (nor an asterisk, of course). 25% of them were lists starting with bold or italic text. |
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| This means, that over 26% of list items start with a letter immediately after the bullet, and over 57% of 1st level list items didn't have a space after the bullet. This is an enexpectedly high result. |
| Here's an example text, using equal signs (headings) and number signs (numbered list). |
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| I didn't mean to count the average length of the entries, but I used {{{wc}}} without any parameters, so this data came for free. I found it interesting that spaceless items are on average longer than the "spaced" ones. I went to several randomly picked pages, and checked their history. It turns out that the list items wereinitially paragraphs, but somebody decided that they look better with a dot in front of them, so he went trough the source and added an asterisk at the beginning of every paragraph. I don't know in how many cases it was what happened, but one is sure -- the experienced users will use the minimal markup that works -- especially when reformatting existing text. |
| {{{ |
| **START** I think these are also realistic |
| examples using #1 equals signs, or #2 number |
| signs in normal text. Where #2 might be frequent, |
| #1 not as frequent. Also someone could use |
| equals signs in texts. Since we allow one |
| = equal sign to be a valid header. Therefore |
| this also causes trouble. So someone could use |
| an example in an exercise where he uses |
| -2 as some value and tells someone should multiply |
| it with a value so that the end result |
| =4. Someone also might use stars as regular |
| footnote markers, etc.. **END** |
| }}} |
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| Now the results for lists with higher nesting level than one: |
| It is true, that the first example with hyphens is more frequent than the second example. |
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| * 657078 list items without a space |
| * 389956 list items with a space |
| * 62% of 2nd and higher level list items without a space after the bullets |
| === Implications |
| A user that breaks the line hard (hitting return) has to be aware that he should not use markup characters as the first character in the next line, that have meaning as a first character in a line (no matter if this proposal will be accepted or not). You should not use software that is breaking the line hard, when working with wiki markup. |
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| Honestly, I don't really know what that means :) |
| * Equal Signs (Headings) |
| * Number Signs (Numbered Lists) |
| * Hyphens (Unnumbered Lists, if this proposal is accepted) |
| * .. |
|
| ---------- |
| [#1] For reference, [[RadomirDopieralski]] wrote the following on [[Talk.Require Space After Bullet Proposal]] on 2007-02-09: [[BulletListOnWikipediaResearch]] |
.