asterisks as bold or italic? (another push)

[european bob]

On Tue, 2004-03-30 at 21:06, Joshua Herzig-Marx wrote:
> One more good reason for *strong* and _em_: MS Word's autoformat
> feature used *bold* and _italics_. Not that many of us would care, but
> if we're looking for the tool to be used by less technical folks...

As does OpenOffice.org. But, we're confusing semantic and presentation
in the above.

Em is emphasis, strong is more emphasis. On that basis, *strong* and
**stronger** makes lots of sense. How they get rendered is really a CSS
issue; ** looks stronger than * and <strong> is stronger than <em>.

The question is more really whether or not _{1,2} should be an synonym
for emphasis. I have to say, it doesn't really look like emphasis to me,
it looks like underline. It definitely doesn't look like italics. But, I
don't totally see that having it as a synonym is necessarily a bad thing
if you accept the paragraph above.

--bob.