(Nick Reinking <nick(a)twoevils.org>)g>):
Anyways, what I want to clarify. To me, when my mind encounters '' or
''', it thinks, "Ooo! Quotation marks that make stuff bold!". My
mind
is used to closing quotation marks, so I guess that's why it makes the
most sense for them to span multiple lines until they are closed. I'm
not sure how quotes work in a lot of other languages, but I know they're
closed in Japanese much the same way (but with different symbols than
quotation marks).
That's not to say that stopping them at the end of a line is a bad idea
- I'm sure it helps a lot to prevent new users from making a bad
mistake, seeing a messed up page, and giving up.
In the end, I'm writing a new parser for Wikipedia, not for myself. If
everybody thinks it should end at newlines, I can make it do that, and
that will be that. :)
There are other reasons to kill them at line-ends. Primarily, the
block-level elements like lists and <p>s and <pre>s are defined by the
first character of each line; allowing '' to span lines would require
that we close and re-open them at paragraph boundaries to stay valid
HTML, and that's complicated and error-prone. Second, just /defining/
proper behavior requires specifying some maximum scope; otherwise,
things like '' a ''' b '' c ''' d '' ...
will just stack up without
closing. If we define them to close at line-end (and I'd further
define them to stack at most two levels), then they're easier to
cleanly specify.
--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee(a)piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC