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

[solderpunk]

On Mon, Jan 20, 2020 at 12:09:01PM +0000, James Tomasino wrote:
 
> One could always cheat
> and just use unordered lists and start each one with a number:
> 
> * 1) item one!
> * 2) A really long item two that will be wonderfully reflowed on small
> screens by our awesome client writers.
> ** 2a) I'm lookin' at you, Michael!
> ** 2b) And the rest of you too. ;)
> 
> Saves us a bit o' logic. Keeps everything line based. You could run a
> stateless renderer on a stream now and it wouldn't choke.

This has two other advantages, too.  First, when processed by a simple
client which opts not to treat list items as anything special, the
result is still obviously an ordered list.  Under the + proposal, it
will look just like an unordered list whose author chose a different
bullet character for reasons of taste.  Ambiguous degredation is not
graceful degredation!

Second, authors can unambiguously refer back to a list item in later
writing.  I can say "Tomasino used a winky face in item 2b above" and
you can all go back and find 2b and confirm this.  If I said that and
you were using a simple client that just rendered + and ++, it would
be up to you to mentally figure out which point was 2b.  And even if
you're using an advanced client that does render ordered lists, I
might write "2b" but your fancy client might use Roman numerals for
second level lists and print 2ii instead of 2b, and again the
connection wouldn't be immediate.  This could only be solved by
tediously specifying that first level lists MUST use Arabic numerals,
second level lists MUST use lowercase letters, third level lists MUST
use Roman numerals, and so on and so on.  And then what happens when
somebody uses more than 26 second level list items and we run out of
lowercase letters to use?

A spec that can avoid all these problems will be exactly the kind of
long, tedious, fiddly spec that I really don't want us to use, and which
nobody will want to code to anyway.  I'm starting to think we should
either drop the ordered list idea, or at the very least strictly limit
it to one level with no nesting.

Cheers,
Solderpunk