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

[tomas@tuxteam.de]

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

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.

> 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.

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).

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 :-)

Cheers
-- 
t

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