Interesting Issue

[John Gruber]

Ian Gregory <ianji at zenatode.org.uk> wrote on 12/10/04 at 12:59pm:

> 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).

I only use `*` too, but, trust me, many people use `_`. I've
received more mail on this issue than anything else related to the
syntax, and the feedback has made me convinced that I made the right
decision here. As a general principal, yes, it's a better idea to
provide one good way to do something. But the problem here is that
both styles -- *this* and _this_ -- are in long-standing wide use in
the real world.

Textile uses _em_ and *strong*, and but because I've been using
asterisks to denote what I intend as the plain-text equivalent of
italics, it made me not want to use Textile.


> 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.

Again, this is because people have long written bullet item lists in
plain text using these characters. For example, the text editor Vi
has a special folding mode when you write list items using `-`. It's
important to Vi users to be able to do this.

-J.G.