RE: [EXTERNAL] Question about Codimd for w.g. minutes

["STARK, BARBARA H" <[e-mail]>]

Really, I suspect at least one of your 2 notetakers was either too lazy to insert those extra blank lines while typing or didn't want to impact the experience of people who might be following the discussion using the rendered CodiMD notes (because the additional blank lines create blank lines in the CodiMD rendering).

I think it's probably less laziness than unfamiliarity with the quirks of markdown, combined with the fact that CodiMD renders those single newlines as line breaks, so it "LGTM"  in the side-by-side or rendered view. It's only when processed through other tools in what is ostensibly the same ecosystem that the faulty assumption is revealed.

This is a fairly benign version of a more general problem of under-specification of semantics. (JSON and YAML come to mind.)

<bhs> I wouldn't discount laziness so quickly. Though Carsten pointed out another reason that probably influenced me (I'm the self-accused lazy one of Bob's notetakers) not to add the extra lines while taking notes: blank lines in the markdown mean less of the typed notes are visible to the notetaker. That's a feature I hadn't consciously recognized but now agree was probably quite influential in my thought process. I did notice that the CodiMD markdown was rendering each line of typed text as a separate line of rendered text and thought this was unexpected and wondered if datatracker would do this, too. I will admit that I wasn't familiar with the convention of using 2 spaces at end of a line to create a <br/>. I'm still thinking I'll edit minutes I publish (as chair) to give each speaker their own paragraph rather than just format everyone's comments into a big paragraph with lots of line breaks. But I won't judge others' choices. - Barbara