I don’t see any way to make the change I suggested above without radically rethinking the way the spec is written for list items and other block constructions. The spec relies on the principle of uniformity: it says that, if some lines constitute blocks Bs, then the result of adding a list marker and indenting appropriately gives you a list item containing blocks Bs. So, if a blank line were required outside list items, it would be required inside list items as well, and you couldn’t have sublists like:
1. one
- two
So I have made the following, compromise change, which I think addresses at least the biggest problem. An ordered list item can interrupt a paragraph (i.e. occur where a paragraph continuation line could normally be found, with no preceding blank line) only if it starts with 1. or 1). Thus,
The Captain died in
1868. He was buried in...
does not create a list. But
Our top priorities are
1. fix ordered lists
does.
This fix does not help with the confusion about one-character setext heading lines and empty bullet lists. But I would propose that this be solved in a similar way, by stipulating that a bullet list item can only interrupt a paragraph if it is followed by some non-blank content. [EDIT: now implemented.]