Talk.Spir

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Inline nowiki and monospace can be totally distinct in Creole (triple-braces for nowiki and double-sharps for monospace).

-- YvesPiguet, 2008-Sep-16

Thank you, spir

Alinea? #

spir says:

In many wiki languages, including creole, a newline works 
as above specified for all kinds of alineas except for regular 
text paragraphs. In that case, a single newline is ignored ; 
a logical newline is marked by a double newline ; a visual 
newline is set by a special break tag. 

I don't yet understand why this approach seems a significant issue for you. Would you mind giving an overview of its faults? Also, your definition of "alinea" -- which involves a "string" -- appears at odds with its standard definition as a single character... (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alinea).

The pilcrow (¶; Unicode U+00B6, HTML entity ¶), also 
called the paragraph sign or the alinea ...

Thanks! -- John McClure

well, alinea !#

Hello John,

Thanks for paying attention. Plan to write an extensive explaination on newline / paragraph problematic. Try anyway to synthesize my point of view here for you -- and as a stub (rough? proper word?).

(foreword : I recently discovered the ChangeLinebreakMarkupProposal which is a rather long list of points, but imo nevertheless doesn't really address all aspects of the problem. Or inverses priorities, letting technics before use. In fact, I would say that techncians, which obviously we all are, should let their opinion after users' ones, for they are not the target public of such a tool as wikitext -- weird rules aren't a problem for them and they have other means.)

First, I introduced "alinea" as a plain to to avoid confusion both with "line" (possible confusion : logical line, paragraph, broken line, visual line, wrapped line) and "paragraph" (confusions with the ordinary sense i.e. a type of alinea, and with <p>...</p>). So "alinea" means paragraph-level elements, thus including list item, header, table row... And it means only that. Note that alineas are the only explicit structural elements marked in creole, their tags beeing = * # | and (nothing). A page is a sequence of alineas.
lexical note : '¶' is called "alinea" in germanic languages, but has other weird names in other languages ("pied-de-mouche" = "fly-foot" in french ;-)). '§' is called "paragraph sign" in romanic languages and germanic ones except english. "alinea" has a sense close to "paragraph" at least in french and dutch : (free translation from wikitionnaire.fr)
One or more sentences of a text or book separated from previous and next ones by a whitespace.
If you find a better word or overall way to avoid confusion, I will be pleased. Or we run for standard wiki jargon definitions of both "paragraph" (extension of the meaning to all paragraph level element types) and (restriction to ligical lines). I would be pleased to welcome clear and strandard words. Also for newline, new line, like break, etc...

A newline may have such functions :

1. if ignored : nothing
   

Present rule in creole for regular paragraphs only.

1. if simply taken as char : break a line
   

Doesn't happen in Creole.

1. if parsed as tag : end an alinea
   

Present rule in creole for all other alinea types.

First, there's an evident lack of consistency. As a user, I wondered why a newline worked "normally" for lists, not for regular paragraphs. Also note that the simple newline (introducing or not a new paragraph) is from far the most used formatting mark!

Second, how can we accept such a major difference between the source and displayed text? Confusion for sure. This breaks the prominent rule that source & display are as similar as possible, so that one can write naturally, even not well knowing markup and predict the output.
If this were not so relevant, we should adopt another markup for tables, e.g. one cell per line, to allow for much better layout.

Moreover, what does the user/author expect? Either case 1 or case 2. Then comes a big issue about choosing the one or the other, as well as several ways and interpretations of the various alternatives.
Anyway I hold on the fact that at least & and in all cases the simple character value of a newline should be preversed.

It also makes the rule more consistent with the case of headers, list items and table rows. In case #2, I would accept with pleasure

• either a paragraph start character like for all other alinea type (like § ¶ _ or whitespace, never mind),
• or keeping a blank line as paragraph separator.

This solution is probably better vusually, in source text. But it is less consistent and may lead to a slightly different semantic (more about that later).

I welcome all objections about that, especially

• the de facto standard in the wiki world
• the impossibility to paste text from editors which include hard line breaks.

(pleased to have expressed it), denis alias spir