Re: `=item 1. Text` Doesn't Produce Ordered List Item

On Jul 24, 2010, at 7:02 AM, Sean M. Burke wrote:

> On 07/22/2010 02:12 PM, David E. Wheeler wrote:
>> On Jul 22, 2010, at 2:38 PM, Russ Allbery wrote:
>>> That's not because "=item * Stuff" is being specially recognized.  That's
>>> because "=item <anything>" where <anything> isn't a bullet or a number
>>> produces an unordered list.  perlpodspec does say that, although I admit I
>>> had to read it a couple of times.
> 
> Hooboy, join the club.  I wrote that stuff /so I could forget it/.  I think.  I forgot.
> 
>> No, by my reading, “"=item <anything>" where <anything> isn't a bullet or a number” should be a definition list item.
> 
> To cut short an agonizingly long story, please have it be something like:
>   <dt style="margin-left: 1em">
> 
> Basically: the default rendering of <dt> snaps the text /completely/ back to the margin that our "=over" means for us to be getting away from.
> 
> That style="..." value stops it from doing that.
> Ideally it'd be in a brilliant-pod.css whose artisanal value for dt would be merely one facet of a gem of typographical perfection, but, uh....
> I say jump into Pod/Simple/HTML.pm, strike
>    item-text=dt
> and go up and add
>  'item-text' => '<dt style="margin-left: .5em">',
>  '/item-text' => '</dt>',
> and run!  Run like there's zombies chasing you, zombies made out of SGML!

Frankly I wasn't worried about the =over. I never took it to mean a literal indentation so much as a list marker. Given the amount of code that depends on Pod::Simple::HTML, I'd be disinclined to make this sort of change. But that's also why I prefer Pod::Simple::XHTML, which outputs no style information at all. CSS really should be done elsewhere, IMHO.

For the purposes of this thread, my question is: Should we support `=item 1. foo` as creating an ordered list item the way we support `=item * foo` as creating an unordered list item? I vote yes, as it seems more consistent, and we're not going to remove the latter. What about the rest of yous?

Best,

David