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

[solderpunk]

Just a quick response for now: nice post, thanks, there's a lot in here
that I agree with (and I had been starting to think similar things about
quotes), but can I ask you to elaborate on:

On Sun, Jan 19, 2020 at 09:01:17PM -0500, Michael Lazar wrote:
 
> Lists are tricky because while they would be nice to have, the complicate the
> parsing significantly. In order to parse a list while preserving its semantic
> structure, you will need to keep track of where it starts and ends. Nested
> lists complicate this even further, no matter which syntax for nesting is used.
> 
> Parsing lists semantically would require keeping a separate buffer for each type
> of list, and then keeping flags and making sure that these buffers are flushed
> after the last element in the list. Because of this, I do not believe that they
> pass the power-to-weight ratio smell test.

In particular, what do you mean by "parsing lists semantically"?

At no point in these discussions have I been envisaging anything to do
with lists which requires clients to recognise or keep track of whether
or not they are "inside" a list or not, or sticking lists in buffers.
I have imagined list items standing alone and "lists" being an emergent
property of a document that clients have no awareness of - in exactly
the same way that "paragraphs" are an emergenty property of lines (if
some of those lines happen to be blank).

Well, that's true for unordered lists, at least.  Ordered lists are
another story 

Cheers,
Solderpunk