.
This is a proposal by ChristophSauer and ChuckSmith:
During the WikiSym workshop, after we decided that a double asterisk would be best for bold, the group decided "unanimous minus two" that the hyphen would be best for bullet lists. However, at this point, ChuckSmith realized due to his research of wiki syntaxes that approximately 90% of wiki engines use asterisks for bullet lists. After the initial desigh Creole 0.1 with hyphens we decided mainly because of that to use asterisk for unnumbered lists as well, see the Talk.Lists for the story. We now have to concede that we made a mistake and accept the use of asterisk instead of hypens for bullet lists.
It has become obvious by the RequireSpaceAfterBulletProposal that the intuition of the group at the WikiSym workshop was right, that using asterisk for both bold and unnumbered lists would create difficulties in implementing parsers, especially parsers that are based on regular expressions (see CommonWikiParsingTechniques). You will find code examples that show those problems in the BoldAndListsAmbiguity page.
Considering the facts behind 25% of list items on Wikipedia not using space after the star and 25% of lists have items starting with italics or bold[1], this combination is not an EdgeCase. This means that proposals like RequireSpaceAfterBulletProposal would make it more difficult to use Creole than necessary. Proposals like this are a sign that something in the design is wrong and accepting this probosal would only cure a symptom. That's why we ask the comunity to accept this new proposal to switch back to the original design on using hypens for unnumbered lists.
- item 1 - item 2 -- **item 2.1** --item 2.2 - item 3
Note that we do not require a space after the hypens.
Disatvantages#
- not as frequently used as asterisk
- ambiguities with horizontal lines and the common use of two dashes for signatures.
Advantages#
- no BoldAndListsAmbiguity
- usually the first guess of endusers, (look into your mailbox for the usage of lists, see Line Break Case Studies)
- hypens are easy to type (usually easier than asterisk)
- hardly any collisions with existing markup
- not new (see PukiWiki, SnipSnap, XWiki)
Ambiguities Resolution#
In the following section we will show solutions for the abiguities already discussed on the Talk.Lists page involved with hyphens. Opposed to the bold as the first formatting in a list item, we consider these combinations as root for ambiguities as EdgeCases.
Horizontal Lines and Signatures#
In general a unnumbered list alway has to start with one hypen. Horizontal rules are on a line by themselves.
----
The same is true for signatures.
-- HomerSimpson, 21-Feb-2007
Please use the ListsAndHorizontalLinesSingaturesAmbiguity page to discuss the issues and solutions.
Using Minus as first Char in Lins#
This is an EdgeCase. For those cases we should introduce a general escape Character other than space , because we want to allow spaces in front of lists.
5 - 10 ==== - 5
This example shows that using a character like a hypen as a first char has actually the same problem as using a equal sign as the first character. While we do not loose a word about the headings so far there has been concerns about minus as a first character (see Talk.Lists). Both have to be handled anyway. Therefore we would like to suggest general escape character other than space, see TildeEscapeCharacterProposal.
5 ~- 10 ~==== ~- 5
If we would use space as a escape character we would not be able to allow space in front of lists for example anymore.
[#1] Chuck, please add a reference here (source where you get the number of bold usage in wikipedia from)