Text reflow woes (or: I want bullets back!)y

[Michael Lazar]

On Thu, Sep 5, 2019 at 3:04 PM Sean Conner <sean at conman.org> wrote:
>   Or how about:  lines that start with '=>' are links and are handled
> differently, lines starting with a ' ' are fixed (but should be
> less than N characters in length), and starting with any other character
> should be reflowed until a blank line, a line staring with '=>' or
> whitespace.
>
>   So this wouldn't be reflowed.
> But this would
> reflow because it doesn't start with a whitespace
> => example:foo link text is handled differently.

I'm not a fan of using significant whitespace in markdown languages.
Spot the difference between these two lines. One should be fixed width and
one should be reflowed:



Beyond that, I can't help but feel that this would lead to the worst of both
worlds. If I drop down to fixed width lines (say N=70) because I want to add
a bullet list to my page, now clients must render at least 70 lines in order to
accurately view my content. So what good does having other sections of reflowed
text do for me at that point?

I do think that preformatted text blocks have their place in markdown
languages for simple things like code snippets and ASCII art. The kind of stuff
that you can cut off and it doesn't affect the readability of the page. But you
can't extend them to replace all of the page formatting. In my opinion this
needs to be an all-or-nothing decision:

1. Fixed-width text with no special syntax
2. Reflowed text with some simple flavor of markdown for styling