Whitespace sensitivity is cool#
Wed, 03 Jul 2002 14:13:47 +0000
Whitespace sensitivity is cool
For some reason I've started reading and contributing to Ward's Wiki a lot more lately. When I was first doing Wiki I was mostly using Netscape 4, which gives you some idea of how long ago it was, because I can't actually remember when was the last time I used Netscape 4. Mozilla rocks.
But, anyway, well. Except for this bit. "This bit" is that wiki
has Text
Formatting Rules which demand a variety of keyboard gymnastics,
not least among them that various formatting (UL lists, BLOCKQUOTE,
PRE etc) demands the insertion of a literal TAB (ASCII 007) character.
Pressing TAB in a Mozilla text field, though, makes it go to the next
text field instead of inserting anything, ^V doesn't seem to do the
conventional readline "insert next character as literal" thing, and
the conventional Emacs "insert next key as literal character" thing -
don't press that. Without prompting
to do anything with the four paragraphs you just typed, either ...
So, I cut and paste from my scratch buffer, which is silly but just about livable. But, this is wrong. This is Free Software. Even if I will probably never ever myself actually write code for a project in which the majority of a 45 minute "how to hack on $project" talk is given over to a description of getting reference counting right, I can at least file a bug report. Or at least, read the bug report that someone must already have opened on this subject and see if there's some way to do it already that I'm missing. Well, they did, and there isn't. Bug 29086, has been open for more than two years, and attracted so much argument that it's over 100k long as viewed by lynx -dump
Lessons we can learn:
- There is - or should be - an analogue of Godwin's Law which substitutes "recommend the introduction of a configuration option" for "compare your opponent to Hitler"
- I should add mpt's weblog to my usual reading list instead of stumbling across it once a month
- Whitespace sensitivity is a Bad Thing. Let's just remind ourselves of that once again
(Yes, I know there's a workaround in Wiki, but it's heuristic and doesn't seem to do too great a job)