a case for native bounding asterisk support

[Christian Perry]

Respectfully, I don't think it's too late at all.

If I read your response correctly, a redefinition of syntax (in the case of
asterisks) would render user content "incorrectly." By incorrectly, you
mean that the content would be unformatted, displaying asterisks literally.

My understanding of the MD specs is that they were designed to parse
asterisks according to an already widespread convention. (My original
argument was incorrect in this respect -- this is indeed a use case with
precedent, equally alongside the others that I mentioned.) If asterisks
returned like bookends to their phrases, their understood meaning would
remain intact by those who read them. If you don't understand *exactly*
what I mean, then reread this sentence.

The edge case of bounding asterisks is that they're human-parseable when
displayed literally. And when we're talking about UGC in particular, the
other uses of bounding asterisks are much, much, much more common than the
urge to emphasize -- yet they depend upon the asterisks being displayed
as-is. (Emoting within fandom cultures is the main use case for which I'm
advocating: *tries to do something, gets frustrated when it makes it seem
like I'm formatting my text instead*)

Tens of millions of people use bounding asterisks to emote, every day --
but their choices of platforms that support this syntax has dwindled
precipitously due to auto-parsing. There is every bit of a case to be made
for markdown being the *cause* of incorrectly formatted text, when one
limits the scope to how real users talk to each other every day.

Maybe a separate set of guidelines for content platforms would be
appropriate. I see this as the only change that would need to be made. And
I assure you that if asterisks are shown just as they're written, it will
be seen as usage both intentional and understood, rather than incorrect.




On Wed, Jun 3, 2020 at 6:36 PM Allan Odgaard <
1EDF4D33-D1B1-4C97-A393-3D2B4EE5E095+Markdown at uuid-mail.com> wrote:

> On 4 Jun 2020, at 5:29, Christian Perry wrote:
>
> > To move the conversation forward, I propose an alternative markdown
> > italicized syntax: *bounding double exclamation marks*.
> >
> > For example: Huzzah, we can !!finally!! use bounding asterisks again!
> > *celebrates with much rejoicing*
>
> The widespread convention in “my circles” prior to Markdown (mailing
> lists related to the Amiga), was *bold*, /italic/, and _underline_.
>
> Curiously Markdown appropriated the convention for both *bold* and
> _underline_ as italic (emphasized).
>
> But it’s obviously far too late to do anything about it now, as there
> are thousands of parsers that use this convention, not to mention the
> untold amount of user content that would render incorrectly, if the core
> syntax of markdown was redefined.
>
> Instead you need to lobby the various online communication platforms not
> to force markdown upon you as the only markup language, at least they
> should offer you a way to disable it.
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