URLs with underscores

[Bowerbird at aol.com]

first, mid-word emphasis is not rare.  uncommon, certainly, but not rare.

second, the most common conventions in plain-text communication
are for underscores to indicate italics and asterisks to indicate bold.
many other characters are used too, but those are the most common.
while those might not be the delimiters you would choose to use,
they are the ones that emerged out of the chaos as the "winners"...

third, i think it is quite possible to determine if a string is a u.r.l.
-- there are usually more than enough clues to make it unequivocal --
and then, when it is, to skip the translation of underscores to italics.

***

paul said:

>   It's worth remembering that _this_ in Markdown doesn't italicise text, 

>   it places it within HTML emphasis tags. The traditional default display 

>   for emphasis may be italics, but <em> doesn't = italics.


righto.  now can you tell us _why_ that is "worth remembering" here?

-bowerbird