Interesting Issue

[Ian Gregory]

On Fri, Dec 10, 2004 at 12:21:06AM -0500, John Gruber wrote:
> Lou Quillio <public at quillio.com> wrote on 12/09/04 at 10:16am:
> 
> > But it can't read your mind without mis-reading mine, ya know?  So
> > it has to have rules, and a user has to know them.  Easy, intuitive
> > rules, but rules in fact.  Endless cleverness seems to chase "no
> > rules" or a synergy of all possible rules.  Not possible.
> 
> Right. That's my main concern here.
> 
> There's no question that Markdown could be at least a little more
> clever in terms of figuring when `*` and `_` are being used
> literally, rather than to denote emphasis, even when they aren't
> backslash-escaped.

I have been following this discussion with minor interest
but have had a vague feeling that something was not being
said which should be. I have just realised what it is!

Why are there two different characters to denote emphasis?
When I am writing plain ascii I only ever use "*", and my
impression is that "*" is used far more often than "_". So
rather than introducing an asymmetry between the two or
trying to do anything clever I would vote for demoting "_"
to have no special meaning anywhere (and it's not like it
would affect the *output* in any way).

Another option would have been to use "_" for <em> (which
in my browser gets displayed as underlining I think) and "*"
for strong (which if I recall correctly gets displayed as
bold). This would have eliminated the need to use "**" or
"__" to get the <strong> effect. That would of course
reintroduce the $my_troublesome_variable problem, but because
"_" and "*" would then have clearly separate purposes it
would be less confusing to have different parsing rules for
the two. Of course this would be even nicer if <em> ("_")
was guaranteed to be rendered as underlined and <strong> ("*")
as bold.

For the same sort of reason I thought it was a retrograde
step to allow "+" and "-" to be used for unordered lists in
addition to "*". It caused me a problem because I had some
hyphens in blocks of text that had ended up at the beginning
of a line when I had wrapped it, and they suddenly started
getting interpreted as list items. Having just a single
character ("*" for example) for unordered lists seems much
better to me. Again I should make it clear that having the
additional options provided no extra control over the output -
it just makes it more difficult to remember the syntax rules.
I know I don't have to use "+" and "-" in *my* markdown files
but I need to be aware of them if I ever want to read, parse
or transform anyone else's.

-- 
Ian Gregory
http://www.zenatode.org.uk/ian/