Interesting Issue

[Lou Quillio]

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Ian Gregory wrote:

> Why are there two different characters to denote emphasis?

It's all in this list's archives, though you'd have to dig a bit.

A judgment was made that *this* and _this_ are both conventional
plaintext email formatting to indicate emphasis, and that it would
be tyrannical and mistaken to impose a distinction.  It was further
judged that **this** commonly means emphasis-plus (strong).  So you
can see how we got here.  It began with the conviction that neither
_these_ people nor *these* people be forced to change.  That's not
an unsound judgment, imo.

There were arguments, but they were all based on personal taste and
weren't getting anywhere.  John made the call, as he should, and it
was based on *inclusion*.  Tough to argue with.

> 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).

That was the leading alternative.  A decision was called for, and it
lost.  Markdown's already too widely used to re-open this can of
worms (I supported the alternative, btw).

> 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 "*". 

Again, inclusion.

> it just makes it more difficult to remember the syntax rules.

Not that difficult, not really, eh?

> 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.

Set-off with appropriate spacing and linebreaks, I think folks
recognize a list regardless of the bullet.

Myself, I think the idea that `<em>` and `<strong>` are degrees of
the same thing (emphasis) is whacked.  But that's how W3C treats it
- -- and we *are* writing XHTML here, and user-agents are being built
to reflect the W3C-ratified distinction.  Markdown embraces these
semantics through *some* emphasis (`<em>`) and **more** emphasis
(`<strong>`) -- for better or worse, as an act of faith.

As we're finding, though, writers think primarily (almost
exclusively) in terms of visual bold and italics, and use them for
unrelated purposes.

Anyhow, decisions had to made so that MD could progress.  They've
not all been what I or someone else might prefer, but they've been
consistently altruistic in character -- right down to the
accommodation of explicit inline markup.  It fails-over quite elegantly.

And, although it's a righteous achievement, Markdown isn't the last
XHTML pseudomarkup scheme.  Anybody may hack it, or devise their
own.  That's the great equalizer in these disputes of taste.

LQ
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