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kagan — 2014-09-04T19:46:12-04:00 — #1
Thanks to unicode, we can write the following bulleted list in plain text, without the translation to HTML
• Hello
• World!
Again, what you see above is NOT the following code, but plain text:
<ul>
<li>Hello</li>
<li>World!</li>
</ul>
If you forget to add two trailing spaces after "Hello", the markdown would convert it to
<p>• Hello
• World!</p>
and the browser would render that all in one line, which would look like:
• Hello• World!
This is obviously worsening the original text.
Therefore, I propose to extend the list of list markers -, +, or * with the unicode bullet character (U+2022) in section 5.2.
zzzzbov — 2014-09-04T21:21:59-04:00 — #2
I'm on the fence as to whether I agree with adding U+2022 to the list of special characters that a compliant markdown parser would be required to support for bullet notation.
Can you point to instances of the bullet character being used "in the wild" for plaintext documentation? It seems like it would be awkward to try to insert a bullet character instead of the standard -, +, and * characters.
roryokane — 2014-09-04T21:37:57-04:00 — #3
I personally use the bullet character whenever I have to write a list in plaintext. It is rare that I actually have to write in plain text and need a list – I usually write in Markdown – but it has happened, such as one long-form survey question I answered in a browser textarea.
On OS X, you can insert a bullet • with the key combination Option+8. I don’t mind typing real bullets on OS X because it is convenient. When I use Windows, which requires you to hold Alt and type a four-digit code to type a symbol, I don’t bother to use real bullets. So it seems that this feature mainly caters to OS X users.
kagan — 2014-09-05T03:09:43-04:00 — #4
I can't. However I would very much like to use the •. I think it is natural to use it, because it is there. Just like using any other punctuation character in the ASCII Table.
The current line break rules prevent me from doing do. The question is, why do I need to convert a piece of text into something else, if it is already perfect in its raw form?
Thanks, I didn't even know that 
Now I will use that in future.
The fact, how easy or difficult it is to insert that charcter should not drive the standard. The user interfaces change all the time. Who knows, windows and linux might make it more easy to access the • some time soon too. New markdown editors might make it easier or you might even see new keyboards with the • some day.
The point is: The • is standardized. The spirit of markdown is that a plain text document without conversion to HTML should still look good. The conversion to HTML must remain a bonus, not a necessity. The original markdown rules make a bulleted list using bullets look uglier than the input.
nagisa — 2014-09-05T03:48:13-04:00 — #5
Not really. People with proper compose key setup can write most of unicode symbols and characters with relative ease 😉.
arthur_peka — 2014-09-05T04:24:15-04:00 — #6
I personally like the idea - it is more simple than the original list syntax, but it doesn't seem to be convenient to me to insert unicode symbols.
Maybe • could be substituted by + sign?
So you could write:
+Hello
+World
Or even by * sign:
*Hello
*World
Looks more readable to me.
kagan — 2014-09-05T09:27:54-04:00 — #7
The current spec allows +, - and *. This works already with pretty much all implementations. My point was to add the bullet character to this list, not to replace.
In my opinion, it is not relevant for a standard, if it is inconvenient for some people. For many it is.
And even if it was inconvenient for all, that would be still irrelevant. More important is the following question:
What happens when this is not implemented?
Answer:
Markdown destroys a plain text "bulleted" (literally) list by placing the whole list in one line.
arthur_peka — 2014-09-05T09:45:21-04:00 — #8
Never mind, my proposition was to remove space between + (-, * - whaterver) and an item. So that you write +Item,not + Item. I'm not so sure about that now, though. It's a little easier to parse IMO, but maybe less readable.
roryokane — 2014-09-06T14:32:51-04:00 — #9
Wikipedia – Compose key has more information, for others who didn’t know about it.
jim_balter — 2014-09-07T18:48:48-04:00 — #10
Some people have 21st century keyboards, and they will become more prevalent.
The original point remains unaddressed; for those who do use a bullet, the CommonMark output mangles the input.
Even if so, what's wrong with making CommonMark work well for them?
rwzy — 2014-09-07T21:30:33-04:00 — #11
The point of markdown is also to use common characters available on the vast majority of keyboards to derive it's syntax from, making it 'easy' to do formatting and such. I understand that your keyboard supports it easily enough, but most people's don't…
So one reason for not having it in the spec as a list marker is because people who can't easily input the bullet (which is a lot of people at least right now) might be presented a situation where the markdown document they have received uses bullets. So they'd either have to change all the bullets to what they can easily use, or difficultly input bullets if they want to edit it, making it inconveniant, hard and therefore against the philosophy of markdown for them (which = most people). They'd need to do that because different list markers indicate a new list, so they can't just mix your bullet with their preferred list marker, be it -, + or *, between different list items.
I thought the same with emacs and grid tables. Where emacs relates to your keyboard, and grid tables relate to the bullet character.
What's a 21st century keyboard?
