Re: [Docutils-users] Lists and indenting

[David G. <go...@py...>]

Beni Cherniavsky wrote:
 > I mentioned that David found this in a style guide because I know he
 > looks up things in style guides but now I'm not sure I didn't mix up
 > with another issue...  David, can you confirm/refute this?

I can neither confirm nor deny this allegation.  (Can't remember :-)

It seems to me that the lack of initial-line indentation for bullet &
enumerated lists probably simply came from StructuredText.  That rule
made sense to me, and I never thought to question it.  There were
other, more pressing concerns with StructuredText list markup: the
requirement for blank lines between list items, the "o" bullet marker,
the vague enumerated list markup spec.  All are covered in
<http://docutils.sf.net/spec/rst/problems.html>.

One initial motivation for reStructuredText was to do away with the
most onerous form of indentation in StructuredText, for section
structure.  This can be generalized into a principle of avoidance of
unnecessary indentation.  Considering also the inherent ambiguity of
allowing & ignoring indentation for lists (is it just an indented
list, or is it a list in a block quote?), I'm comfortable to proclaim
that reStructuredText won't support it.  Correctness trumps
convenience.  ReStructuredText *is* a markup system, with rules, and
authors have to learn those rules.  The rules can be (and are, IMO)
easy to learn, but the learning can never be made effortless.

-- 
David Goodger    http://starship.python.net/~goodger
For hire: http://starship.python.net/~goodger/cv
Docutils: http://docutils.sourceforge.net/
(includes reStructuredText: http://docutils.sf.net/rst.html)