[Mediawiki-l] Preformatted text within lists?

Fri Dec 17 13:13:57 UTC 2004

I entered this into bugzilla, but I'm posting it here in the hope that
someone can suggest a workaround.

Thanks,
David

Currently, list items are terminated by a newline. I'd like that rule to be
modified so that list items are terminated when the next line begins with some
sort of list specifier, or when the next line is empty (or perhaps only
whitespace). Lines that begin without list specifiers should be treated as
separate paragraphs.

The current rule makes it very troublesome to create list items with multiple
paragraphs, and as far as I can tell, there is no way to embed preformatted
text in a list item. For example:

# This is the first list item, first paragraph
This is the first list item, second paragraph
   Here is some preformatted text with the first list item
   Here is the rest of the preformatted text
# This is the second list item (numbered as 2)

With the current rule, the above is rendered as a single item list, then a
plain text paragraph, then a preformatted text paragraph, then a second single
item list whose number starts with 1. This makes it difficult to create
sophisticated lists. Under my proposed change, the above would be rendered
instead as a single list, where the first item contains two plain text
paragraphs and one preformatted text paragraph.

This change is mostly compatible with current Wiki pages, since most authors
would normally place an empty line after their list before starting non-list
text. One could justify the use of a single newline to start a new paragraph
instead of an empty line because one is in a list context. (i.e. the whole list
is a single paragraph.)

By the way, as a workaround I'm manually numbering my paragraphs:

1. This is the first list item, first paragraph

This is the first list item, second paragraph

   Here is some preformatted text with the first list item
   Here is the rest of the preformatted text

2. This is the second list item (numbered as 2)

Please let me know if you have a better workaround.

_____________________________________________________________________
Dr. David Coppit                    Assistant Professor
coppit at cs.wm.edu                    Department of Computer Science
http://www.cs.wm.edu/~coppit/       The College of William and Mary