[Wikipedia-l] Re: New bug concerning lists

Sun Mar 16 21:36:02 UTC 2003

Karl Eichwalder wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>I certainly hope that this one does not get "fixed".

>If the error will continue to stay for too long, it will be me who will
>have to go.

That would be too bad.
But you're probably not going to get far calling it an "error",
when people worked hard on the programming
to get it to specifically do just what it does.

>-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
>== title ==
>line
>-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
>and
>-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
>== title ==
>
>line
>-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
>must come out the same:
>-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
><h2>title</h2>
><p>
>line
></p>
>-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

They don't *must* come out the same; that's up to us all to decide.
And the wiki parser was specifically designed so that they don't.
(This particular effect was the result of a big compromise, as it happens.)
Of course, the <p> is irrelevant in HTML 4 --
by HTML specs, they *must* be rendered the same by the browser --
which is why people worked on getting different CSS as well.
(When we go to XHTML, where the initial <p> will be required,
then presumably we'll have to rely on the CSS for everything.)

>Just make it a habit to produce XHTML and problems will vanish with a
>sudden.

*These* "problems" won't vanish -- the differences will still be there.
In the case of the line break, nothing would change.
In the case of the header, the CSS would still produce the effect.

>>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.

Ah, there's your problem.  Turn these off when editing wiki files,
and all will be well.  You can even set up emacs to do this automatically
when you edit a file whose name ends in (say) ".wiki".

>>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.

Then that's a documentation problem.
Where does it say that? and I'll fix it.

-- Toby