I like this better than the PHP Markdown Extra syntax. Not only does it solve the look-ahead problem, but I always found placing the colon at the beginning of a line awkward (a notation that only Forth programmers can love … ).
Note that “definition lists” (I just can’t cope with the HTML5 renaming frenzy …) are not specific to HTML; similar elements exist
-
in DocBook as
<variablelist>
, or -
in the NISO Journal Article Tag Set (JATS) as
<def-list>
(properly named “definition list” …), -
also in the ISO Standards Tag Set (ISOSTS) as
<def-list>
too (since ISOSTS is an adaptation of NISO JATS), and -
in ISO 12083:1994 there are similar
<deflist>
,<term>
,<dd>
elements (again described as a “definition list” …) with this content model:<!ELEMENT deflist - - ((head, ddhd)?, term, dd)>
-
and ISO/IEC TR 9573:1988, ISO/IEC TR 9573-11:1991 (
<DL>
,<DT>
,<DD>
), and ISO/IEC 9573-11:2004 (<tl>
,<termdef>
,<termdes>
) are more examples.
So there is amply justification for having a dedicated and nice Markdown syntax for this kind of lists in my opinion.