Hello List,<br><br>Firstly, I was very impressed when I tried markdown 2.0 recently. Fantastic work all!<br><br>I have a query about the treatment of emphasis. <br><br>I realise that the horse has bolted, and changes to currently supported functionality are unlikely to attract support. However, there does seem (at least in my tiny mind) to be a mis-match between the following stated goal and the present implementation of emphasis:<br>
<br><br>Quote (from <a href="http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#philosophy">http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#philosophy</a>):<br> Markdown’s syntax is comprised entirely of punctuation characters, <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 153);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">which punctuation characters have been carefully chosen so as to <b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 153);">look like what they mean</b></span></span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">.</span><br>
<br><br>It seems to me that *writers* who are not programmers are thinking in terms of italic, bold, underlined, or stuckout text and so on. A *writer* is not thinking about abstract concepts like <em> or <strong> or any HTML at all.<br>
<br>During a process of "marking down" some informally structured text files in order to get them into HTML, I have encountered the following "syntax" : <br><br> Here is some plain text that looks /italic/.<br>
Here is some plain text that looks -s-t-r-u-c-k-o-u-t-.<br> Here is some plain text that looks _underlined_.<br> Here is some plain text that looks *bold*.<br><br>This issue I see is that stylistic information intended by the author is <b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 153);">lost</b> by the current implementation. Markdown supports only two flavours of emphasis (<em> and <strong>) while writers can intend at least the four flavours of emphasis mentioned above (bold, italic, underlined, struck out). I.e., information is "lost in translation".<br>
<br>Also, there is no guarantee that browsers will render <em> or <strong> in the style intended by the author, because <em> and <strong> have intentionally been abstracted away from the writer's concepts of bold, italic, underlined and so on. I don't see that those abstractions are helpful where readability of the plain text source file, and the goal quoted (above) are the primary concerns.<br style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 153);">
<br>One possible solution to my issue would be something like this:<br><br> /some text/ --> <font style="italic">some text</font><br> -s-o-m-e-t-e-x-t- --> <font style="struckout">some text</font><br>
_some text_ --> <font style="underline">some text</font><br> *some text* --> <font style="bold">some text</font><br><br>I anticipate that there probably won't be much appetite for changing the markdown tool, so I intend to have a go at implementing the above for my own "local" markdown (with approximately zero knowledge of Python). However, I would be interested what other list members think about this? Does anyone else see it as an issue or not?<br>
<br>Thanks all, and GREAT WORK markdown team!<br><br>Simon<br><br><br><br><br><br><br>