On Sat, Nov 10, 2007 at 01:04:37PM +1100, Steve Bennett wrote:
On 11/10/07, Simetrical
<Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I would view bold italics with adjacent
apostrophes as a corner case.
The behavior in that case makes very little sense and I doubt it's
being widely used.
There's one obvious use: French. Eg: L''''arc de triomphe de
l'Étoile'''
appelé...
(though interestingly when I got to that page, the initial ' was actually
a ')
But yes, clearer, unambiguous syntax that didn't rely on arbitrary
processing rules would be good.
For example one might define a character like _ which represents a
non-joining non-space. So the above could be written L'_'''arc de
triomphe''' which would be clearer and unambiguous.
Or, and here's an idea I don't see much, we could define **bold** and
//italics// as *additional* ways to punctuate such things, and keep the
old ones until they wither and die.
L'//arc de Triompe// would be *entirely* unambiguous.
(As I continue to note, any extended syntax in this specific area
should track historical usage as closely as possible to comply with the
Principle of Least Surprise.)
It shouldn't be all *that* hard to instrument the parser to flag such
constructs and put them in extra columns or a parallel table.
Make analytical work a lot easier, too.
Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra(a)baylink.com
Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100
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