On Thu, Jun 22, 2006 at 11:21:29PM +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
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.
Rendering foo--boo as an endash would be inappropriate, even if the
editor intended an endash, anyway. Endashes are not meant to be used as
hyphens, and should have a space on either side of them.
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'm not sure I see how something good for MediaWiki is bad for
Wikipedia, in this case. Could you elaborate on the difference as it
relates to this issue?
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.
That's sort of the problem: people will keep doing emdashes with -- and
never realize something's wrong, in many cases, I suspect.
Of course, considering the miniscule differences between hyphens and
endashes, I'm not sure endashes really need to be addressed for general
visual formatting purposes. I'm sure there are some strict endash fans
who will disagree vehemently with me, though.
--
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [
http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
Brian K. Reid: "In computer science, we stand on each other's feet."