For Creole 0.4 I'd like to bring out the issue of spaces after the bullets. The current (0.3) draft and previous specs have this ugly special case: 

''About unordered lists and bold: a line starting with ** (including optional whitespace before and afterwards), immediately following an unordered list element a line above, will be treated as a nested unordered list element. Otherwise it will be treated as the beginning of bold text. Also note that bold and/or italics cannot span lines in  a list.''

I think it's ugly and complicates the parser needlessly. Also, many wikis already have very similar list markup, just without this special case -- making them accept both Creole and native markup at the same time would require some sort of a hack (I can't even imagine it currently). One possible way of getting rid of that special case and still keeping list markup unambigous with bold markup is __requiring__ a space after the bullet. 

Now, this is a different case than with space __before__ the bullet. There are wiki engines that don't allow space before the bullet, and those that require it -- making it optional is really the only way to make them agree. On the other hand, no wiki engine I know prohibits the space after the bullet. Some require it. 

Moreover, putting a space after most punctuation characters is a tradition, and for many people -- a reflex. I can see nothing unnatural in requiring it -- and __it simplifies the parsers and the specs__ -- making Creole both easier to implement and to teach.

For consistency's sake, it would also apply to the numbered lists and indentation (if included) -- that resolves a conflict with {{{#pragma}}} syntax that some wikis use.

We can also drop the requirement of emphasis not spanning lines with this.

=== Advantages to NOT requiring space after bullet ===

*more user freedom
*less user frustration
*already in [Creole 0.4]
* less keypresses
* less space taken up by the raw text in the (possibly narrow) textarea

=== Advantages to requiring space after bullet ===

* makes parsers easier to write
* no ambiguity with bold
* no ambiguity with {{{#pragma}}} or {{{##comment}}}
* more readable (and nicer, heh) raw text
* leaves more space for extending (using different characters for bullets)
* consistent with the tradition of putting a space after punctuation characters
* consistent with the practice of using at least two characters for markup
* consistent with the (both default and traditional) presentation