[Wikipedia-l] Re: New bug concerning lists

Sun Mar 16 20:59:49 UTC 2003

At 08:49 PM 3/16/03 +0100, Karl wrote:
>Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> writes:
>
> > I certainly hope that this one does not get "fixed".
>
>If the error will continue to stay for too long, it will be me how will
>have to go.

This seems to be a matter of incompatibility between your preferred
editing software and the Wikipedia software. I wouldn't call that a 
bug--neither
was written specifically to work with the other--and it shouldn't be an
insurmountable obstacle.

> > I hope that someday PediaWiki will recognise a lack of blank line,
> > not only next to headers but also next to lists, rules, etc,
> > as indicating that a feature is next to (or within) the paragraph.
>
>I guess you are talking about the next bug I want to go reporting :)
>
>-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
>== title ==
>line
>-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
>
>and
>
>-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
>== title ==
>
>line
>-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
>
>must come out the same:
>
><h2>title</h2>
><p>
>line
></p>

Why must they? Do we have a spec that says linebreaks should be
ignored in input but produced in output?

>But the parser forget to eat spaces at the start and at the end of the
>title line ("== title ==" -> "<h2> title </h2>") and is does bad things
>to the paragraph (the <p> element).
>
>Just make it a habit to produce XHTML and problems will vanish with a
>sudden.

Is that an offer to work on the code?

> > Is your offline editor really unable to handle long lines?
> > (I only remember emacs' being brought up,
> > but I edit wiki files with emacs all the time.)
>
>I'm using 'turn-on-auto-fill' and 'fill-column' (72 resp. 79) for text
>mode and related modes.  And I use fill commands to make the text look
>nice.

That makes sense when your editor is producing final text. It's not useful
when you're producing input for a formatter--whether that formatter is
PediaWiki, Quark, or a browser that's expecting HTML and CSS.

> > In any case, these aren't bugs, but feature requests.
>
>I'd rather rate these things as bugs.  Somewhere is the claim that
>empty lines are paragraph separators.  The wiki-to-html converter does
>not obey this rule.

Where is the claim? Unless that's in our spec, it's not a bug. Certainly,
you can't get your preferences installed and made high priority by asserting
that it's a bug that the software isn't doing things that aren't in its design
or specifications.

-- 
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org