Emphasis with `_`

[John Gruber]

Michel Fortin <michel.fortin at michelf.com> wrote on 05/24/05 at 7:10 pm:

> I don't have much to add to the discussion we had back then, but I want 
> to say my opinion on this now favour asymmetry between asterisks and 
> underscore as emphasis markers. *At least in a comment field.*

If we were still in beta or pre-release, I would agree to this without hesitation. My reservation at this point, however, is that there might be people who have already written something like this:

    I said "_free_way", not "_three_way".

and then when they upgrade to the latest Markdown, their old entries
will break.

That doesn't mean I'm opposed to it, it's just that this is my
reservation.

The way I see it, we could do it two ways:

1.  Require only one `_` at word break.

        _freeway_   =>  <em>freeway</em>
        _free_way   =>  <em>free</em>way
        free_way_   =>  free<em>way</em>
        fr_ee_way   =>  fr_ee_way

2.  Require both `_`s at word breaks:

        _freeway_   =>  <em>freeway</em>
        _free_way   =>  _free_way
        free_way_   =>  free_way_
        fr_ee_way   =>  fr_ee_way

Option #2 would be optimized for people who tend to use underscores
literally. Option #1 would be much less of a change from the
existing behavior.

Michel, do you have any data from the people comlaining about this
regarding how often the erroneous `_`s occur at the beginning of a
"word"?

> * * *
> 
> John any progress lately on Markdown 1.0.2? Things seems to be stalled 
> right now.

Pretty much fell off my desk, I'm sad to say.

I guess it's a question of how many little bugs I want to fix now,
and how many should wait. Perhaps it'd be better to just tie off the
current loose ends and call it a release.

Michel, is there anything in particular you'd like to see in 1.0.2
that isn't there yet?

The big one I know of is that we need to fix this:

    [this] [that] and the [other]
    
    [this]: /this
    [that]: /that
    [other]: /other
    
-J.G.