b and i

[Rad Geek]

On Fri, 14 May 2004 17:45:10 -0700, Fred Condo <fred at tincture.us> wrote:

. . .

> I've created a monumentally simple test page here:
>
> http://tincture.us/absinthe/static/aaron.html
> http://tincture.us/absinthe/static/aaron.css

[N.B.: the sample doesn't work anywhere unless you happen to be able to  
apply arbitrary stylesheets to a given HTML page, because you forgot to  
use a <link rel="stylesheet"> in aaron.html. I don't know whether that was  
intentional or not.]

. . .

> This discussion is rather far afield from Markdown. So I reiterate what  
> I wrote before: it should be easy to get i and b in Markdown because  
> usability is nice and people should be able to avoid markup that's plain  
> nonsense.

Fortunately, it *is* easy to get `b` and `i` in Markdown. (And also `cite`  
and `var` and `dfn` and so on....) Unlike (some) Wiki software, Markdown  
lets you embed whatever (X)HTML you want:

     I don't know about *you*, but *I* think <cite>Foundation's Edge</cite>  
is the
     lamest part of the series.

Or:

     In philosophy, <dfn>metaphysics</dfn> is the study of being
     <span xml:lang="la">qua</span> being. Metaphysical questions are  
questions about
     the fundamental nature of things. (They should *not* be confused with  
questions
     of *epistemology*, which have to do with how we come to *know* things.)

So, I have trouble seeing the mapping of `*` and `**` to `em` and `strong`  
as particularly pernicious here. (It's different for WikiMarkup that tries  
to act as a *replacement* for HTML. But Markdown doesn't do that. So no  
problem, right? Let a thousand semantic tags bloom.)

-C

-- 
Charles Johnson <technophilia at radgeek.com>
AIM: AiPuch
WWW: http://www.radgeek.com/

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