List Markup Alternatives

Suggestion: Give a brief overview plus the pros and cons and link to a more comprehensive external specification (if any).

Whitespace, single dash, single plus #

• Current standard: having to escape the (quite common) "bold at the beginning of a line" is bad.
  • So: Should my proposal prove inadequate (or unpopular ;-) I'm very much in favor of this proposal. Still: Strange escaping rules should be avoided at all costs.
• Repeating the bullet character (vs. whitespace): I am not sure that we are not making common things (at most 2 indentation levels in lists) harder while making uncommon things (more than 2 nesting levels) easier.

I'm in favor of the following syntax (hear me out, I'll consider anti-whitespace arguments)

- one (ul)
  - one.one
  - one.two
- two (ul)
  + two.one (ol)

Advantages:

• Near WYSIWYG: Conforms to common plain text practices, looks a lot like the rendered output.
• Uniformity: ordered and unordered lists have similar "bullets".
• Compared to multiple dashes / no whitespace:
  • No clash with hr
  • No clash with signatures
• Compared to the current standard:
  • No clash with bold at the beginning of a line (which is not uncommon).
• Works quite well in Python and Haskell. This point is only partly humorous, as wiki markup is a semi-formal language and does have some rigid rules, so the same kind of usability rules apply here as they do to programming languages.

Potential disadvantages:

• User has to count spaces: I would count relative indentation (not the absolute amount of spaces), then this is only a problem if one wants to continue a second-level list (see below). But: users look for visual feedback after entering wiki text, anyway, and will be very obviously alerted to the problem then.

- first level
  - second level (counting is not a problem: we just have MORE spaces than the line above)
    - third level 1
    - third level 2 (counting is not a problem: it is the same as the line above)
  - second level continued (here we have to count...)

• Confusing tabs and spaces: disallow tabs.
• Clash with negative numbers: make space after hyphen mandatory. This is how humans disambiguate here, too:

-333
- An item (the above does not look like an item)

-- AxelRauschmayer, 2007-02-28