# Blank lines before lists, revisited

**URL:** <https://talk.commonmark.org/t/blank-lines-before-lists-revisited/1990>\
**Category:** Spec\
**Tags:** release-1.0\
**Created:** [January 15, 2016, 6:21am UTC](https://talk.commonmark.org/t/blank-lines-before-lists-revisited/1990 "2016-01-15T06:21:20Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 22

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![jgm](https://cdn.commonmark.org/user_avatar/talk.commonmark.org/jgm/32/1360_2.png) [@jgm](https://talk.commonmark.org/u/jgm)\
**Post date:** [March 26, 2018, 10:11pm UTC](https://talk.commonmark.org/t/blank-lines-before-lists-revisited/1990/22 "2018-03-26T22:11:29Z")

</div>

To weigh in on the proposals:

(1) (single-digit start numbers) seems okay to me. It might fix some  
practical problems (and might cause some others). On the other hand,  
even with this fix we’d have a mismatch between parser behavior and the  
spec of the sort described in commonmark/cmark#204.

(3) is bad for the reason I just gave in my previous post.  
One-item lists are, in general, useful, so we don’t want to  
rule them out altogether. I suppose we could require at least  
two items when the list interrupts a paragraph, but that creates  
difficulties for parsing: you can’t know you’ve got a list until  
you’ve parsed the whole list item and seen what comes after it.

(4) has a similar issue: we can’t tell if the list is going  
to be loose unless we’ve parsed the whole thing. And I’m not  
sure what is gained by allowing only tight lists to interrupt  
a paragraph.

(5) is going to be problematic for people who wrap their text  
to a reasonable width (say, 72 characters), and also for people  
who don’t hard-wrap at all. And I echo @mity’s worry about surprising  
behavior.

(2) seems the most promising to me, but there is the worry  
about languages with different punctuation conventions.

I guess it might be a good idea at this point if someone  
summarized clearly and concisely why we need to change things.  
My own intervention above was motivated by  
[https://github.com/commonmark/cmark/issues/204](https://github.com/commonmark/cmark/issues/204), but I believe  
that issue could be handled at the implementation level without  
a change in the spec. At any rate, I’ve written a Haskell  
implementation, roughly following the same strategy as cmark,  
which gives the right results in this case.

---

_[View the full topic](https://talk.commonmark.org/t/blank-lines-before-lists-revisited/1990)._