underscore and italic policy

[Michel Fortin]

Le 30 juin 2006 à 16:51, A. Pagaltzis a écrit :


> The only reason that this hasn’t changed, I think, is that

> unfortunately no new releases have happened in a long time.


I'm not sure that's the only reason. John has been reluctant to  
change this part of the syntax now that we're past version 1.0 and  
that some people may be using that particular feature.

In my opinion, the backward compatibility argument has merit,  
especially since in some languages (like Japanese) "words" aren't  
separated by a space character like in western languages. Such a  
change would break any emphasis already written with underscores in  
these languages; someone would have to either manually edit all of  
the texts to change underscores to asterisks or stick to the current  
version of Markdown.

On the other side, I admit that I've changed the behaviour when  
making PHP Markdown Extra and got only positive comments about it.  
This particular problem seems to pop up regularly both on this list  
and in emails I receive. I think this was the main reason I decided  
to implement the change to my "Extra" syntax, were backward  
compatibility was less of an issue.

Here is what I think could be a good, long-term solution: Markdown  
(the syntax) could change and remove underscore-emphasis within words  
while Markdown (the tool) could offer a "backward-compatible mode"  
preserving the old behaviour. This would solve the issue while still  
giving the possibility to upgrade Markdown to those relying on the  
old syntax, with the only hassle of setting a configuration variable.


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