On Thu, Apr 27, 2006 at 06:53:13PM +0100, Timwi wrote:
This thread
has gotten so dense that I can no longer discern what the
topic is, much less who's on which side. If anyone sees fit to
continue it, I suggest they start by enumerating those two things.
Not sure what you mean by 'dense'. My "side" of the thread is just that
I get agitated at illogical/fallacious arguments like "let's not use
slashes for italics -- they look like regular expressions." That's all.
I don't believe it's a fallacious arguemnt. Let me cast it for you
slightly differently:
Choices for inline text markup coding should be made so as to collide
with the least possible number of already extant uses of that set of
punctuation.
That's why [[ ]], '' '', and ''' ''' are
pretty good choices, while the
leading space for indention, slightly less so.
While *bold* would be contextual, since <BOL>* is already in use for
list items, _italics_ would not, and doesn't collide with anything.
/italics/, though, would, probably unexpectedly, collide with the
writing of Regexes, and there's no good way to disambiguate from
context (as there is with *bold face marking*).
Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth jra(a)baylink.com
Designer Baylink RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates The Things I Think '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA
http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet and in e-mail?