[Docutils-users] "Forgiving" mode

[David A. <DavidA@ActiveState.com>]

Is there an option I don't know about to let docutils barrel through and never 
raise an exception when processing a document?  I'm all for strictness in 
formatting in 99% of cases, but I'd like to use docutils to convert old 
documents written in "vague structured text" into HTML, in cases where there 
is no reason to go back to the original texts to make them conform.

It appears that the failures i'm encountering in these old corpora are things 
like:

     When referencing an external web page in the body of a SPEC, you
     should include the title of the page in the text, with a
     footnote reference to the URL.  Do not include the URL in the body
     text of the SPEC.  E.g.

         Refer to the Python Language web site [1] for more details.
         ...
         [1] http://www.python.org


Where the ... is interpreted as a heading marker -- if I change the "."'s to 
"1"'s, docutils has no problems.

Note that while this is from an old PEP, I have other documents which have the 
same idiom:

         # if unknown message -> do mime parsing, regex rules, eval tests, etc.
         ...

Maybe we could make ... a special case?

Thoughts?

--david