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About Taskslists page is confusing #39352

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@kevincathcart-cas

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@kevincathcart-cas

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What article on docs.github.com is affected?

https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/writing-on-github/working-with-advanced-formatting/about-tasklists

What part(s) of the article would you like to see updated?

This article begins like:

About tasklists

[!IMPORTANT]
Tasklists are retired. You can read more about this on the GitHub Blog.

You can use sub-issues as the replacement for tasklist blocks. Sub-issues provide a dedicated section within each issue, making it easier to track related work without relying on Markdown. For more information about sub-issues, see Adding sub-issues].

A tasklist is a set of tasks that each render on a separate line with a clickable checkbox. You can select or deselect the checkboxes to mark the tasks as complete or incomplete. ...

This is pretty confusing and somewhat misleading. One could easily conclude from that notice that the whole page here is about a retired feature, but it isn't. This is partially a naming conflict. The basic GFM feature of unordered lists with checkboxes were historically called "task lists" (notice the space). Then a new feature came along called "tasklists" (no space), which were a fancier tacking feature based around task lists contain inside a special code fence. That is the feature that was retired in favor of sub-issues. At some point, the spelling of the old feature seems to have been updated to "tasklist", which means the other feature would need to be called "tasklist blocks" for clarity.

My understanding is that regular old GFM task lists are not retired or even deprecated and were never planned for retirement. It is also true that users may want to consider using sub-issues instead of classic task lists for work items big enough to benefit from issue level tracking. But regular tasks lists are still ideal for simple tasks that need to be tracked that won't benefit from a full-blown sub-issue. For example, the task list items found in the PR template for this very repository.

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