Nested lists: why 2 spaces for unordered lists, 4 spaces for ordered lists?

Why are there difference in the required spaces for ordered/unordered lists? The following will work fine:

* one
* two
* three
  * sub1
  * sub2

1. one
2. two
3. three
    1. sub1
    2. sub2

But change the 2 spaces to 4 i in the first list, or the 4 spaces to 2 in the second list, and it will give a warning. Why not consistence?

[gandalfsaxe]

Thanks for your answer. The section in the CommonMark is quite dense and goes into a lot of things, including indented paragraphs in general, but I found the relevant section here right below this example: https://spec.commonmark.org/0.28/#example-256

So as I understand it: the CommonMark spec’s point of referenec is that it wants two spaces of indentation for sublists. However due to the fact the numbered lists have an extra character compared to unordered lists (* vs. 1. ), we want three spaces in numbered sublists. In other words, we care more about visually indentation than the number of spaces being the same in both kinds of sublists, correct?

I don’t know if I like this. Seems to over-emphasize the visual appearance at the cost of simplicity. The difficulty for me comes in when I’m working with markdown in practice in editors (in my case VSCode) that support a fixed settings of 2 or 4 spaces of indentation. Any solution to this? It seems very sub-optimal to have to think and manually insert the correct number of spaces for sublists when writing markdown.

[DavidAnson]

I’m afraid I don’t have any good suggestions for that issue. I agree with you that 2 spaces after the ordered list marker doesn’t look as good and that lists of 10 or more items seem uncommon, BUT I appreciate the tabbing scenario they are trying to handle without breaking existing documents. To my thinking, code fences are better because they are more explicit, but there are plenty of places that don’t use them.