On 6/22/06, Chad Perrin <perrin(a)apotheon.com> wrote:
Would requiring spaces on either side of the double
dash before
converting it into an emdash improve the parsing behavior any? It
should at least solve the image name problem, since spaces in image
names should (in my honest opinion) be considered a no-no in any case.
Then again, I'm not in charge, of course.
I actually don't like this solution, even though it seems neat. The
trouble is, it's just not "intuitive" in the sense that no one would
expect markup to behave differently whether it has spaces around it or
not. Someone is likely to see "foo--boo" get rendered as an en-dash
and think "damn, how do I get an em-dash?" Nothing else -- with the
exception of space indentation itself -- in mediawiki gets rendered
differently depending on spaces surrounding it.
Or maybe I'm confusing Wikipedia and MediaWiki here - your solution is
perhaps not bad for MediaWiki, switchable by individual site admins.
But for Wikipedia it's a bad idea.
I suppose I should go look at the bugzilla discussion
now. I seem to
recall, last time I looked at it, that the endash people were advocating
for -- being translated to endashes and --- to emdashes, which seems
That was one or two tex-fans...
counterintuitive for both, since endashes are supposed
to be shorter
than - and emdashes have been represented as -- for so long and in so
many contexts that using three dashes will just confuse the heck out of
many. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think so.
It's "intuitive" *after the fact*. "Oh, I get how it works now -
that's cute!" Em-dash from -- is blissfully ignorantly intuitive -
people will get it right without even realising that they were doing
anything. Many editors probably don't even realise that -- is not a
good way of doing an em-dash at the moment.
Steve