There was a consensus at the wikisim 06 to use dashes for unnumbered lists because otherwise it would be confusing with the markup for bold (**x**). As far as i can remember all but Chuck and Me voted for dashes. We voted against it because the asterisk is simply used by almost all wiki engines for this. Eugene pointed out that he used dashes before there was the markup and as far as I remember I did that in simple text files as well. One has just to look in old readme.txt files. You often find dashes for unnumbered list there. Since I think **x** are the best markup for bold, I would go for dashes as well now.

Dashes interfere with the syntax for [Lines], but i think lines are not that important anyway. If we leave out lines in creole or find an other syntax for it i would not mind.

Option one with *
{{{
== Option 1

This is a **bold** text

* element 1
* element 2
* ** this is a bold text element 3**
** this is a second level element
}}}

Option two with dash -
{{{
== Option 2

This is a **bold** text

- element 1
- element 2
- ** this is a bold text element 3**
-- this is a second level element
}}}
--[Christoph] 28-Aug-06

There is a somewhat weird behavior of some web browsers (so far tested it only on the Gecko-based ones) that convert first-level bullets to some characters when copied as text. So far I've seen '*' and '#' used, and I'm not sure what it depends on. I know it might not be very important.

As for conflicts with bold and hr, I think the hr conflict can be resolved easier:

{{{
** is this text bold
** or are these just two second-level list items
}}}

{{{
---- This is a fourth-level list item
----
This is a horizontal rule. It must be alone on a line.
}}}
Also note that 4th-level list items are going to be rather rare...

One problem with dashes for bullets is for lists of numbers:
{{{
- 10
- 15
- -32
}}}

Are those number positive or negative? This can be confusing.
I know that [YAML|http://www.yaml.org/] also uses dashes for lists, maybe we could learn from their experiences?

-- RadomirDopieralski 2006-08-30


I like the idea of dashes as a separate character from asterisks for bold. As you note this allows for bold within a list easily.  Hey, I'd like the idea of different characters for different actions where possible right across Creole :-) [MarkGaved] 31-Aug-06

I wonder what is the rationale behind forbiding white space before the bullets. I can guess it's about ambiguity, but I'd like to have it written. I can tell that I often indent lists -- just by reflex -- and also many text editors do that automatically.

-- [RadomirDopieralski], 2006-09-01

The next revision of the recommendation should be explicit about multiline list items and empty lines between list items. -- [AlexSchroeder]

Should there be a limit to the nesting depth of the lists? It would greatly simplify writing regular-expression-based parsers. And there is
a limit to what can fit on a page anyways. -- [RadomirDopieralski], 2006-09-04


i like the idea of limiting it to 4 levels, someone noted at the workshop (I think it was Janne) that more than this is considered bad style in writing anyway.

--[Christoph] 4-Sep-06

----

If we choose to support multi-level lists, these examples could be useful:

Good:
{{{
- One
- Two
- Three
}}}
{{{
- One
-- One One
-- One Two
--- One Two One
-Two
}}}
{{{
- One
## One One
## One Two
--- One Two One
- Two
}}}
{{{
Some paragraph text
- One
Some text
- One
- Two

- One
}}}

Bad:
{{{
-- Zero One
- One
}}}
{{{
- One
# One
}}}
{{{
- One
--- One Zero Two
}}}
{{{
 - One
   -- One Two
}}}
{{{
- One
-- One One
Some text
-- Zero One

-- Zero One
}}}

-- Anon

I think allowing allowing whitespace before the - or * or # will make it more difficult later to move to a scheme where indentation matters. Plus, we don't allow leading whitespace for headings. -- AlexSchroeder

Users will indent lists. I see that over and over again at wikis i run where non techies are involved. Since JSPWiki does not allow whitespaces i have to correct them over and over again. Same was reported by AlainDesilets. I did make extra notes on the help pages, but this had no effect. I think we sould never rely on indentation as a markup element. It is just not intuitive. Like it never was intuitive to start a comment in AS400/RPG programm on certain line. Not allowing whitespaces in the front of lists is a compromise to the rule of the least conflict, thats why I would not vote against it, so it can go into the 0.1. But i personally don't like it. 

It's hard to count characters, it's even harder to count characters that are not there. I will vote against a scheme where indentation with white spaces matters.

--Christoph