Emphasis with `_`

[Michel Fortin]

Le 24 mai 2005, à 22:52, John Gruber a écrit :

> 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.
>
> [...]
>
> 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"?

I know someone who claims having to correct two comments a day because  
of this, which is about 1/3 of the comments. (I would like to see the  
site with these comments.) It's enough to make him want to [improve the  
syntax][1].

  [1]:  
http://www.semiologic.com/2005/05/23/towards-a-markdown-reloaded- 
plugin-for-wordpress/

But I have to admit I do not have much statistical data on this.

* * *

I'm not sure if it has been discussed before, but I think it is a lot  
worse to convert underscore to emphasis when it should not doing so  
when it should... Because if you write something like this:

	un_fucking_believable

even with no emphasis applied it's still readable and it do not change  
much the meaning. It's annoying that emphasis is not there as expected,  
but nothing more. While if you write this:

	the_smart_variable is altered by the set_option() function when
	it calls potato_soup().

After Markdown formatting, every underscore is lost and the names have  
changed, which can be pretty misleading to the reader. The same applies  
to path names or urls: if the underscore is removed, the path no longer  
works. This is more than a little annoyance.

If we want Markdown to be used in comments then I say this should be  
addressed, either by changing the Markdown syntax, or by creating a new  
Markdown-For-Comment syntax. This is because you can't expect every  
commenter to read the syntax prior posting.


Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://www.michelf.com/