asterisks as bold or italic? (another push)

[John Gruber]

Timothy Binder <lists at cyberthorn.net> wrote on 03/30/04 at 5:41p:

> I hadn't realized that XML only had the five entities. That explains 
> the use of decimal-encoded entities in SmartyPants.

That's not the reason why SmartyPants uses decimal entities.

SmartyPants uses decimal entities because they (decimal entities)
are better-supported by old browsers like Netscape 4. If I had kept
SmartyPants private to me, it would use named entities, but for
widespread use, many people require support for browsers that don't
grok named entities for some of these characters.

The plan is for SmartyPants 2 to support numerous output formats,
including:

+   decimal entities (currently the only option in SP 1.x)
+   named entities
+   raw UTF-8

But let's finish Markdown 1.0 first.

-J.G.