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I’ve been noticing for a while that older entries have bulleted lists that are not rendered correctly (they appear as running in-line text with asterisks). Invariably one finds that this occurs only if there is no space (blank line) between the bullet entries; putting in that space seems to fix the problem. I don’t know if this is a technical glitch, but I thought I’d bring it up.
I’ve noticed it too. I think it’s enough to have one blank line before the list begins. Evidently the markdown renderer changed at some point in time. Would it be possible/easy to grep through the whole nlab to fix this everywhere it occurs?
This was discussed before here at the forum, but I can’t recall where.
Earlier nForum thread (Aug 11th 2014): Broken lists. May I suggest that any further discussion happen there?
I, and I’ve noticed other people, tend to edit in a blank line after viewing a page with a broken list, though in one case I fixed somebody’s fix who didn’t know that only a blank line was needed.
If a page has unfixed lists does that mean that nobody knowledgeable has read it since last August?
Rod – I actually prefer to have extra lines between bullet entries anyway (much as Urs gives himself lots of space, for example an extra line after a +– line or before a =– line in theorem environments). In general, I prefer to have extra space if it makes it easier (for me) to parse when in edit mode. (And that’s especially so in math mode in LaTeX when the bracing and bracketing becomes very involved.) And therefore I would prefer not to have such a fix “fixed” (nothing is broken!).
As to your question: it’s either that, or somebody knowledgeable was feeling lazy. :-)
I find that when I write a list, the list sometimes seems logically to be a part of the same paragraph as the surrounding text and sometimes not. I prefer to have blank lines around it only when it is a separate paragraph. In the past, I had no choice but to put a blank line after the list, because otherwise Markdown would not render it correctly; but a blank line before the list was optional1. So there was a real meaning in whether I put in that blank line.
That said, people should keep adding in the blank lines before lists when needed (as I also do), for the same reason that I always put blank lines afterwards. The important thing is that the list should render as a list, not that subtle things about paragraphs should appear in the source code even though they never made any appropriate difference to the rendered page. But it might amuse you to know that there was some method to it all.
But if there was only one item in the list, then the blank line before was also needed, if I remember correctly. ↩
I wrote:
though in one case I fixed somebody’s fix who didn’t know that only a blank line was needed.
Todd wrote:
Rod – I actually prefer to have extra lines between bullet entries anyway (much as Urs gives himself lots of space, for example an extra line after a +– line or before a =– line in theorem environments).
I wasn’t talking about fixing a working list or taking out blank lines. Just today I fixed a fix by Anonymous Coward who “fixed” coequalizer#7 by changing a 1 to a 2 rather than adding a blank line.
That page is probably in the category of “hasn’t been looked at for years by anybody nLab knowledgeable.”
Just today I fixed a fix by Anonymous Coward who “fixed” coequalizer#7 by changing a 1 to a 2 rather than adding a blank line.
Personally, I prefer to have the ‘2.’ in there anyway, even with the blank lines. It's nice that the software numbers the list items automatically in case we move them around, but it helps to read in the editing window if the numbers increase in the source as they do in the output.
That page is probably in the category of “hasn’t been looked at for years by anybody nLab knowledgeable.”
John Dougherty knew what he was doing in 2014, but otherwise, yeah.
Just to make the point that preferences vary: I prefer not to increase the numbers in the source, because if we do, then if someone reorders the items or inserts or deletes one, then the numbers in the source would, although present, no longer correspond to the actual numbers displayed, which could be confusing. Whereas if every line is numbered ’1.’ then it is obvious that the numbers are being autogenerated on display and shouldn’t be expected to correspond to anything in the source.
I also generally prefer to minimize unnecessary blank lines, because they waste vertical space when editing a page, reducing the amount of the page that I can see at any given time. Moreover, if there are no blank lines in between bulleted lists, or between the begin and end of a theorem environment, then it is more clear to me visually that the entire list or environment “belongs together” as a block. If there are blank lines between everything then I have more trouble seeing at a glance the structure of the document.
Sometimes I vary the number of blank lines to indicate higher or lower levels of division. (Leaving them out entirely within a logical paragraph, as in my comment #6, fits in with that.)
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