= Details =

 Applies to:: 1.5.4
 Purpose:: Disables automatic indentation of paragraphs based on initial whitespace.
 Description:: 

When MoinMoin encounters "pure" indentation--an indented paragraph without * or 1. markup--it "indents" the paragraph by treating it as a list item, opening a new list if required.  MoinMoin already has an unbulleted list marked up with a dot (`.`), which performs the exact same function.  This patch removes support for pure indentation, requiring a number, bullet or dot be used to create a list item.

Removing pure indentation gains you two things:

 1. You may add multiple paragraphs to a list item.  Currently, a second paragraph is joined with the previous paragraph, or it is indented, depending on initial whitespace.  Note that it is already possible to add certain block items inside a list item, such as a `pre` block, which appear at the same level as the main list item.  This patch extends that to allow a second paragraph to be created at the same level as well.

 /!\ Try using an empty line (as usual for a new paragraph) and indent next paragraph by the same amount of space as you have before your "1.". Like you see HERE. :)

 As you can see, this suggestion does not work.  It happens to work in the previous case because the parser starts a new paragraph when you have an icon at the beginning or the end, for whatever reason.  In the general case, the lines will be joined, as HERE.  Try adding a smiley to the beginning or end of this sentence and watch a p tag get output.

 In fact, I just noticed that any markup, including `backticks` or italics, will cause a p tag to be output around the entire paragraph (!), correctly rendering the output, like HERE.  This appears to me to be a genuine bug.  If it were fixed, it would eliminate this reason #1.

 2. List text which is vertically aligned for aesthetic purposes, as you might write it in a plain text file, is not indented.  This makes importing plain text simpler.

With this change, the following markup:

{{{
 1. This is a
    single paragraph

    This is another paragraph
 1. This is the final
    list item
}}}

will render approximately like so:

{{{
 1. This is a single paragraph

    This is another paragraph

 2. This is the final list item
}}}

Without this patch, it is possible to make it ''appear'' that a second paragraph is embedded inside another list item.  You would do this as follows:

{{{
 1. This is a
    single paragraph

 .  This is another paragraph
 1. This is the final list item
}}}

While it happens to render correctly on the page, semantically, it is invalid.  The additional paragraph becomes a separate, unbulleted list item, instead of a paragraph embedded within the first item.  It is unlikely to convert correctly to another format, such as DocBook. 

There is another patch floating around which converts a "pure" indented paragraph within a list item into a separate unbulleted list item.  This has the same semantic problem. 

= Problems =

There are two issues with this patch.

First, the ability to "blockquote" with pure indentation is gone.  Since creating a blockquote is (again) done with an unbulleted list, blockquoting was already semantically incorrect, and I can live with the loss.  Also, you can still manually create an unbulleted list using dot (`.`).  In my opinion, blockquoting should have its own markup syntax which outputs an HTML `blockquote` tag.

Second, normal list item text will be surrounded with paragraph (`p`) tags when output.  The output is still valid HTML, but it's probably not ideal.  This is mainly due to my inexperience with the Moin codebase and can probably be corrected.

= Patch =

## we prefer that you send the patch in an attachment to avoid whitespace issues
## you should probably change the name of the attachment here
{{attachment:moin-1.5.4-parindent-2.patch}}

= Discussion =

Updated patch to make sure that dot (`.`) opens a new list when required. -- JimUrsetto <<DateTime(2006-07-31T19:43:43Z)>>

= Plan =
## This part is for Moin``Moin developers:

 * Priority: 
 * Assigned to:
 * Status: 

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CategoryMoinMoinPatch