Redmine

Nick, don't ask me why exactly that is (there are reasons for that, but somewhat deeper than the time I have now allows), but:

> blah
foo

Probably yields what you are looking for:

blah

foo

I don't know if this is redmine mangling textile's bq. tag or earlier redcloth/textile versions behaving that way, but the correct interpretation of:

> blah
> foo

Should be:

<blockquote>
  <p>
    "blah"<br>
    "> foo" 
  </p>
</blockquote>

rather than what we are getting now:

<blockquote>
  <p>blah
  foo</p>
</blockquote>

You can try that on the textile example page, though the tag for (block)quotes there is not > but bq. .

1. the wysiwyg buttons "quote" and "remove quote" add/remove > signs at the beginning of each line
2. when you copy/paste mails, there's a > at the beginning of each line, not just the blockquote. Plus I don't really see how we could have lines quoted multiples times (useful for mails, again) with this syntax

What do you think ?

Well, the single tag that spans until the end of the current paragraph/the next pair of newlines is consistent with the rest of textile, e.g.:

h2. some title
spanning 2 lines

yields a title with a <br> in it spanning 2 lines:

some title
spanning 2 lines¶

or in html:

<h2>
  "some title" 
  <br>
  "spanning 2 lines" 
</h2>

In this respect, the current blockquote implementation breaks the textile idiom.

As to your questions: I'm not sure textile supports nested blockquotes, but that's probably only because of the use of bq. rather than a "specific" tag like >. I think it should be possible to get nested blockquotes with > repetition as it is done for lists (** starts a sublist in another *), as to mails: yes, there'd need to be some mangling to remove the extraneous > on all lines past the first one, but that's the price to pay to have textile rather than mail syntax in the wiki fields :-)

(on a side-note: you can't start with a double-nested list item in textile, i.e. ** foo on its own on a line will still generate a list of depth 1 instead of 2, but I suppose this is more a safe-guard for lists)

Come to think of it, > already does everything we "need" except that it doesn't start a new blockquote when hitting a new > and continues the current blockquote instead.

That's all well and good, for you and I and Jean here to discuss it in the context of a programming condundrum. But I have a dozen new Redmine users looking at it and going "Well that's dumb.", because it is (and i'm certain my users aren't the only ones). Headers make sense that they get a blank line after them. Paragraph tags too. The table syntax, while weird, is still better than MediaWiki's. But the quoting stuff is confusing for reasons passing understanding. I can't tell them to just wrap stuff in pre tags, because then long lines run off the screen and don't wrap, which is confusing as well for somebody not familiar with the problem.

Whether its right or not, in the context of the syntax, its not what people expect. I don't expect being able to paste in random text and have all the formatting preserved, but i DO expect at least the new lines to get preserved, without me having to go massage a giant body of text. \n\r is a \n\r, and that is especially true when quoting.

Oh, and as Jean pointed out, the Quote/Unquote buttons in Redmine add a > to the beginning of each line, whether or not they should or not, based on your summation of how things work, further confusing users and the situation.