# Ordered lists and sublist starts

**URL:** <https://talk.commonmark.org/t/ordered-lists-and-sublist-starts/3693>\
**Category:** Spec\
**Created:** [November 11, 2020, 10:46pm UTC](https://talk.commonmark.org/t/ordered-lists-and-sublist-starts/3693 "2020-11-11T22:46:06Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 10

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**Author:** ![jgm](https://talk.commonmark.org/user_avatar/talk.commonmark.org/jgm/32/1360_2.png) [@jgm](https://talk.commonmark.org/u/jgm)\
**Post date:** [November 14, 2020, 11:55pm UTC](https://talk.commonmark.org/t/ordered-lists-and-sublist-starts/3693/10 "2020-11-14T23:55:52Z")

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This is definitely a rough edge, and I’m not 100% happy with the solution we currently have.

> [@Blank lines before lists, revisited](https://talk.commonmark.org/t/blank-lines-before-lists-revisited/1990/22):
>
> 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 t…

If we were inventing a light markup language from scratch, I’d want to require a blank line before a list or sublist (see [Beyond Markdown](https://talk.commonmark.org/t/beyond-markdown/2787)), for this and many other reasons.

But we’re not, so we need to find a compromise that works.

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