On Fri, Nov 16, 2007 at 08:41:06PM -0500, Brion Vibber wrote:
Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
Can someone tell me why bold and italics are
considered *part of the
spelling of the word* (which seems to be what you're implying here)?
I think you'll find what I'm referring to is the fact that the
apostrophe is used in languages such as French and Italian to elide the
vowels and space between a definite article and a following substantive.
An example:
L'idée ("The idea")
Further, it's frequent for formatting on the substantive to *not* apply
to its preceding article.
Hey! Waitaminnit!
That's... an actual *reason*!
You can't do that here! :-)
This means that if we want "idée" italicized
because it's important, or
a title, or a ship name, or whatever; we'd format it in HTML something
like this:
L'<i>idée</i>
When using the double-apostrophe italics markup (inherited from Ward
Cunningham's WikiWikiWeb via UseModWiki), this leads to a need to handle
markup that looks like this:
L'''idée''
In other words, the issue isn't that the bold or ital is part of the
spelling, the issue is that if you *need* to emphasize the word, you
*don't* emphasize the prefix, by convention.
Got it now. Thanks.
Perhaps Ward wouldn't have picked this syntax if
his original wiki were
in French or Italian, since this case doesn't come up as often in
English (though it can, with contractions and possessives), but he did
pick that and we ended up with it, and over the years we've tweaked the
implementation to handle these sorts of common cases pretty well.
So, we have a markup, and we have an implementation which uses a fairly
straightforward back-facing search to produce behavior which handles the
important common cases the way we want.
I strongly doubt that it's impossible to make a specification of that
algorithm.
Well, happily, it sounds as if Steve Bennett may think otherwise; let's
see how he comes along with that.
Cheers,
-- jr 'PINCH' a
--
Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra(a)baylink.com
Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates
http://baylink.pitas.com '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA
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