The current hack for 1. is causing problems and confusion. It should be replaced by a better solution. Several possibilities:
- Allow any single-digit list marker. (Still a hack, but covers more cases, including most of #2704.)
- Make the colon
:at the end of a line (optionally followed by a single space) an indicator for special treatment of the next line, similar to double space\for hard line breaks. This could be reused (by future extensions) for other things, e.g. blockquote attributions and table or figure captions, but it is a more severe deviation from Gruber Markdown. - Require at least two (tight) list items (of the same type).
- Do not support loose lists to interrupt paragraphs.
- Allow a single-line paragraph (preceded by a blank line) with less than 80 characters to precede a list without the otherwise mandatory intervening blank line.
This is similar but not identical to heuristics I have suggested previously. I’m proposing to choose one of these or a mandatory combination of them, not multiple alternative options.