Re: Is the cascading logic of outlines a feature, or a design bug?

[Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl>]

On 2022-12-27, at 10:00, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 27, 2022 at 08:21:28AM +0100, Marcin Borkowski wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>> > At first it seems surprising that there are those two perspectives
>> > and there's no "right" or "wrong", as the OP seems to assume.
>>
>> FWIW, I think LaTeX also got this "wrong" (and perhaps surprisingly, XML
>> "right";-)).  AFAIR, ConTeXt (which I haven't used for several years, so
>> I might be mistaken) does "TRT" here.
>
> LaTeX picked it up from TeX which picked it up from... print (more

Hm.  It's been decades since I used plain TeX on a daily basis, so
I don't remember exactly, but it seems to me that plain TeX doesn't even
have sectioning macros...

> specifically from academic print). Which has been optimised for a
> couple o'hundred years.

Well, yes, though one might argue that it's only a local optimum;-).

> Donald Knuth was mathematician and computer scientist (and pretty
> fastidious with the smalles details), so I'd assume his choice of
> this "flavour" of document model for TeX was pretty conscious, not
> an accident.

Actually, this is much stronger argument than it might seem.

>> OTOH, I agree that it looks surprising, and we mathematicians (and CS/IT
>> people) would like to have a nice, tree-like structure, but I suspect
>> that not allowing to continue the parent section after the subsection
>> ends is a wise decision.  I highly suspect this would be very confusing
>> for 99% people, which might be precisely the benefit the OP is asking
>> about.
>
> You might not like it -- but I stay by my assessment that there isn't
> a "right" or "wrong" here.

Well, I was a bit tongue-in-cheek here - I meant "right" in the
mathematician/computer scientist mind, which is, let's say, a very
peculiar type of mind...

> The most important thing, IMHO, is to be aware of those two models
> (most of us stumble unexpectedly into it and go "WAT?" -- although
> it has made it to the FAQ by now :)
>
> It isn't difficult to model the one with the other. I already proposed
> having one canonical heading meaning "back to that level", say dash
> or dot, like so:
>
>   * General animals
>     Some text about general animals
>
>   ** arthropods
>      spiders and things
>
>   * -
>     More about animals in general
>
>   ** vertebrates
>      so-and-so
>
> (You could even do with the space alone, but playing with significant
> trailing spaces is asking for trouble: i'd go for some unobtrusive char
> unlikely to be a heading text for itself).

+1 for avoiding significant trailing spaces, and agreed.

> Now for that to be useful, you'd have to gather enough users who
> like the idea and use the convention. It's a communication medium,
> after all :-)

Fair point.  And frankly, I find this unlikely to happen.  As I said,
for me the main argument against "continuation sections" is that they
would probably be /extremely/ confusing to most readers.

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl