.
This is a proposal by ChristophSauer and ChuckSmith:
During the WikiSym workshop, after we decided that a double asterisk would be best for bold, the group decided "unanimous minus two" that the hyphen would be best for bullet lists. However, at this point, ChuckSmith realized due to his research of wiki syntaxes that approximately 90% of wiki engines use asterisks for bullet lists. After the initial desigh Creole 0.1 with hyphens we decided mainly because of that to use asterisk for unnumbered lists as well, see the Talk.Lists for the story. We now have to concede that we made a mistake and accept the use of asterisk instead of hyphens for bullet lists.
It has become obvious by the RequireSpaceAfterBulletProposal that the intuition of the group at the WikiSym workshop was right, that using asterisk for both bold and unnumbered lists would create difficulties in implementing parsers, especially parsers that are based on regular expressions (see CommonWikiParsingTechniques). You will find code examples that show those problems in the BoldAndListsAmbiguity page.
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.
- item 1 - item 2 -- **item 2.1** --item 2.2 - item 3
Note that we do not require a space after the hyphens.
Disadvantages#
- not as frequently used as asterisk in existing wiki markup variants
- ambiguities with other use of hypens as first characters in a line:
- horizontal lines
- common use of two dashes for signatures.
- 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)
Advantages#
- no BoldAndListsAmbiguity, therefore easier to implement
- usually the first guess of endusers, (look into your mailbox for the usage of lists, see Line Break Case Studies)
- looks better (why have we put so much thought into avoiding '''' when we now introduce a similar root of confusion * ** )
- hyphens are easy to type (usually easier than asterisk)
- hardly any collisions with existing markup
- not new (see PukiWiki, SnipSnap, XWiki)
Ambiguities Resolution#
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.
Horizontal Lines and Signatures#
In general a unnumbered list alway has to start with one hyphen. Horizontal rules are on a line by themselves. One could check for four ore more hyphens with nothing else behind it (only space and line break).
----
The same is true for signatures.
-- HomerSimpson, 21-Feb-2007
Please use the ListsAndHorizontalLinesSingaturesAmbiguity page to discuss the issues and solutions.
Using Minus as first Char in Lines#
This is an EdgeCase. For those cases we should introduce a general escape Character other than space , because we want to allow spaces in front of lists.
5 - 10 ==== - 5
This example shows that using a character like a hyphen as a first char has actually the same problem as using a equal sign as the first character. While we do not loose a word about the headings so far there has been concerns about minus as a first character (see Talk.Lists). Both have to be handled anyway. Therefore we would like to suggest general escape character other than space, see EscapeCharacterProposal.
5 ~- 10 ~==== ~- 5
If we would use space as a escape character we would not be able to allow space in front of lists for example anymore.
[#1] For reference, RadomirDopieralski wrote the following on Talk.Require Space After Bullet Proposal on 2007-02-09:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Now the results for lists with higher nesting level than one:
- 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
Honestly, I don't really know what that means :)