I find confusing that the text below is a completely readable paragraph but it is interpreted as paragraph and a list
While the sum of 3 and 2 is 5, its difference is
1. One can also multiply them to obtain 6. Dividing
them one gets 1.5.
Which is converted to
While the sum of 3 and 2 is 5, its difference is
- One can also multiply them to obtain 6. Dividing
them one gets 1.5.
Wouldn’t be safer to consider it a list only if there is a blank line before?
Why would you put the 1. on a new line?
I can’t think of any example or reason where you would break up a line that way.
This would make more sense:
While the sum of 3 and 2 is 5, its difference is 1. One can also multiply them to obtain 6. Dividing them one gets 1.5.
And if you, for some reason need the 1. to be on a new line and not turn into a list you can always do:
While the sum of 3 and 2 is 5, its difference is<br/>1. One can also multiply them to obtain 6. Dividing them one gets 1.5.
Not everyone is used to automatic wrapping of the text. Breaking the sentence in lines is more usual than you think. For instance in emails. That been said, it can happen that someone copies a long text without any list and the parser turns into a list.
I just only want to mention this issue for the record. I understand that if this change makes into the spec many text will break. Hence, I think that would be almost impossible to include such change. Nevertheless, I think for the human perspective it is more clear that a lost starts after a blank line. In the end MarkDown should be readable by humans. And I think that we should not consider that wrapping happens automatically in almost all editors, because it doesn’t.
This is the result of a compromise CM ended up with, because many authors write an introductory line before their enumerated lists, often ending in a colon, and don’t put an empty line between that (turning it into a proper paragraph) and the first list item. In practice, your case is rather unlikely to happen, although I have encountered it frequently with German dates like “1. Oktober 2024”.
Thanks for the consideration. In Basque “first” can also be written as “1.” (all the ordinals indeed), which would add more “corner” cases to the issue. For instance, “You should take the 2nd bus” is translated to “2. autobusa hartu beharko zenuke”. Hence, that sentence becomes problematic unless one scapes the period
Text preceding.
2. autobusa hartu beharko zenuke.
2. autobusa hartu beharko zenuke.
VS
2. autobusa hartu beharko zenuke.
2. autobusa hartu beharko zenuke.
UPDATE: There are some other languages that use period (.) as an ordinal marker Ordinal_dot. German is among them of course.
2nd UPDATE: I see that only 1. among the ordinal numbers can break a paragraph! That’s nice!! Thank you. It makes my example obsolete, and CM much safer. Thank you again.