6 ms·

I wish that markdown formatted bold and italics like this: _italic_ bold instead of: _italic_ italic bold bold because stars aro

I wish that markdown formatted bold and italics like this: _italic_ *bold* instead of: _italic_ *italic* __bold__ **bold** because stars around a word make it look like it's glowing, sort of like bold does, and underlining a word means to make it italic. Does no one remember this? In English class, before computers, our teacher told us that certain words are always underlined: book titles, ship names, etc. In Typing class, our teacher told us that if you submitted a typewritten manuscript to a publisher, what you underlined with your typewriter would be converted to italics in a typeset book. Underlining meant italics. And sure enough, nowadays when everyone has a computer instead of a typewriter, and can make real italics, they tell us that book titles, ship names, etc., ought to be in italics (the same things that my teacher used to tell us should be underlined) https://www.purchase.edu/editorial-style-guide/general-style-preferences/italics-and-underlining/ https://www.purchase.edu/editorial-style-guide/general-style... I get kind of why Gruber did it his way. He was caught up in the Semantic Web, where you don't use and , you use and , and means only more so. So by that logic *this* is emphatic, and **this** is strongly emphatic.

kazinator 7y ago
Moreover, the convention that you advocate is more or less an established practice in Usenet and mailing lists, long preceding markdown. This design decision in markdown is uninformed.
Sniffnoy 7y ago
Agree in general, but don't like the underline/italic thing. Most word processors have underline as separate from underline. Hence the alternative old email/Usenet convention: underscores for underline, slashes for italic.
- combatentropy 7y ago
  Professional typesetters have an aversion to underlining text. It's ugly. The line interferes with descending letters: f, g, j, p, q, y. The underline is as thick as the stroke of a character, so decorative marks compete with signal marks. It's just too strong. That's why you see text underlined in homemade flyers but almost never in books, magazines, newspapers, or other things designed by pros. The recent addition to CSS to specify that underlines go behind the descenders is a welcome change. Professional web designers have the same aversion that print designers have, they are birds of a feather. But now they have another reason to hate it. Underlining has come to mean hyperlink. Because of their original aversion, they will often use CSS to remove that default underline, maybe bringing it back only when you hover over a link. But because it is still a widespread convention throughout the web, and probably always will be, they would never, ever emphasize something by underlining (they use border-bottom ;). Since you should underline something only if it is a link, which has its own markdown, and since underlining is ugly anyway, and since bold and italics are enough ammunition for all your emphasizing needs, and since it is an established convention from the old days that underlining meant eventual italics when it went to press, it's okay in my book to repurpose _underscores_ for italics. Slashes instead on both sides like /this/ --- hmm, it's not bad. I'm undecided.
- JadeNB 7y ago
  > Most word processors have underline as separate from underline. One of those words isn't supposed to be 'underline', right?
  - eyegor 7y ago
    Probably meant italic and underline
    - Sniffnoy 7y ago
      Oops, yes, I did.
Vinnl 7y ago
Two minor notes: 1. "Semantic web" refers to data being linked and having meaning. You're referring to semantic HTML. 2. I don't think meant but more so - as I understood it, meant text that had to stand out from the rest, whereas meant that text was emphasised. Though I might be confusing it now with the retro-actively applied "semantics" of and . Totally agree with the overall point btw, and I do tend to use them in the way you described.
- combatentropy 7y ago
 > I don't think meant but more so I guess it was an HTML 4 thing, the standard at the time of Markdown, https://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/text.html#h-9.2.1 https://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/text.html#h-9.2.1 : emphasis. : stronger emphasis. I see that HTML 5 has tweaked their descriptions, https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/text-level-semantics.html#the-em-element https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/text-level-semantics.... : stress emphasis : strong importance, seriousness, or urgency
 - cornishpixels 7y ago
 HTML 4 was not the standard at the time of Markdown. XHTML was.
 - Vinnl 7y ago
 Huh, I guess it was. Anyway, it was all a whole lot of "semantics-washing" anyway; it's lot like people strictly adhere to strong rules of when text should appear bold or in italics anyway.
 - adrianhel 7y ago
 Agree. It's really missing the point of how this has been used in reality for the sake of promoting semantics in an area where semantics rarely matter.
samatman 7y ago
I'm enamored of the org-mode textual formatting convention: •bold︎•, /italic/, _underline_, =literal=, and ~strikethrough~. Although `literal` a la Markdown is arguably better, I prefer the other choices. Especially because org-mode lets you italicize //Face/Off// by adding more slashes, and so on for the others, like ==e = mc^2==. Incidentally, I have no idea how you're typing literal asterisks, I gave up and am kinda jealous.
- bumbledraven 7y ago
  Judging from the indenting, the poster used HN’s codeblock/verbatim formatting for the asterisks. https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
- joshspankit 7y ago
  /italic/ is also how it used to be done way back in the early BBS/MUD/MUSH days (along with _underline_)
  - ksec 7y ago
    Yes I think this makes much more sense to me since the / operators align with how the characters in italic looks once it is applied ( Slightly tilted ) And underline. I dont understand why they aren't used that way any more.
- SyrupThinker 7y ago
  A small nitpick, its actually ~code~ and +strikethrough+ . [Official documentation](https://orgmode.org/org.html#Emphasis-and-Monospace https://orgmode.org/org.html#Emphasis-and-Monospace)
- adrusi 7y ago
  I really dislike /italic/. Relative to the slashes, the letters look like they're skewed in the wrong direction. Surely it should be \italic\. If unifying underlines and italics doesn't suit you.
  - 7y ago
nabla9 7y ago
//italic// __underline__ **bold**
- hamstergene 7y ago
  This. Using doubles for markup removes the need for backslash escaping when those symbols naturally appear in text,
omnimus 7y ago
Because calling it italic and bold is WYSIWYG all over again something Markdown tried to cure. The proper way to think about is s emphasis and strong emphasis. As user you shouldn't be concerned by how it looks. Thats job of overall design and that might change depending where you publish / who designed it. You shouldn't make that decision because you don't have the required context. Italic will probably be the emphasis (although other designs are possible like change of color). Underline can be used for strong emphasis if it doesn't colide with links. Bold might be too jarring or not possible to use so designer might decide to not use it. There are also other ways to emphesise like small caps or inline background colors.
- DougWebb 7y ago
 As user you shouldn't be concerned by how it looks. Thats job of overall design and that might change depending where you publish / who designed it. You shouldn't make that decision because you don't have the required context. As the writer of Markdown content, you're often both the user of the content and the publisher of the content, so you do care about how it looks. Even if you're just the user, your intention when writing is to communicate something, and the eventual appearance of your content impacts how it is interpreted by the reader. So you still care about how your writing will look, which forces you to care about how the publishing process interprets the markdown syntax.
 - omnimus 7y ago
 I am not saying you can't be both user and publisher. I am saying that these are two different processes often made by different people. When you publish book you have mostly zero power over how it will be designed. And honesty you should have zero power over it because there are people editors/designers/typesetters who dedicate their lives to exactly that. Better to let them handle it. Same goes for the web.
- combatentropy 7y ago
 Everything you say is true. I started making web pages 20 years ago. When I got a real job doing it in the mid-2000s, it was at the height of the push for semantic markup. Over the years I've come to think it is overwrought. First, I think they could have repurposed the old tags. can stand for "important," with a default style of italic, and could mean "bold" in the sense of "strong" or "outstanding", https://www.etymonline.com/word/bold https://www.etymonline.com/word/bold, with a default style of boldface type. You can still restyle them to your heart's content. Second, italic doesn't always mean emphatic. Like I said, it is also a formal convention for: titles (books, movies, magazines), ships, foreign words, legal cases, etc. (Only of large works. For articles and other small works, you quote them. So for example, The New York Times should be in italics, but any particular article, like "Chiefs Win Superbowl", should be in quotes.) Third, the tags are longer, especially instead of . It's noisy. A quibble, you might say. But so is this whole topic. And there is a line where coding goes from fun to tedious. Fourth, an asterisk looks stronger than an underscore anyway: *this* calls out more than _this_ So you could say underscores are emphasis and asterisks are stronger emphasis, even with just one on each side.
gmac 7y ago
Textile got this right: https://movabletype.org/documentation/author/textile-2-syntax.html https://movabletype.org/documentation/author/textile-2-synta...
- Optimal_Persona 7y ago
  You beat me to it, I always thought Textile was the Betamax to Markdown's VHS - technically superior but for whatever reason (actually John Gruber's visibility and GitHub's adoption of Markdown), Textile didn't really gain traction with users.
akkartik 7y ago
Slack and WhatsApp seem to be adding to your case, and they drive lots of usage.
kstenerud 7y ago
It's actually surprisingly difficult to get this kind of thing right. It seems perfectly obvious in hindsight, but while you're designing, little details like this get missed. When I started writing a spec for Concise Text Encoding [1], I figured it would take about 6 months to nail it down (yeah, right). Even now, 2 years later, I'm still making amendments to it because of various things I missed or got wrong. It's either something I happen to notice in one of my many, many re-reads, or something that another person notices after a few minutes reading it over, or something that comes up while I'm writing the reference implementation. Getting a spec right is a marathon affair. [1] https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/cte-specification.md https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ct...
- funcDropShadow 7y ago
  It seems to be an instance of Wadler's Law. > In any language design, the total time spent discussing > a feature in this list is proportional to two raised to > the power of its position. > 0. Semantics > 1. Syntax > 2. Lexical syntax > 3. Lexical syntax of comments https://wiki.haskell.org/Wadler's_Law https://wiki.haskell.org/Wadler's_Law

I wish that markdown formatted bold and italics like this: _italic_ *bold* instead of: _italic_ *italic* __bold__ **bold** because stars aro

kazinator 7y ago

Moreover, the convention that you advocate is more or less an established practice in Usenet and mailing lists, long preceding markdown. This design decision in markdown is uninformed.

Sniffnoy 7y ago

Agree in general, but don't like the underline/italic thing. Most word processors have underline as separate from underline. Hence the alternative old email/Usenet convention: underscores for underline, slashes for italic.

combatentropy 7y ago
Professional typesetters have an aversion to underlining text. It's ugly. The line interferes with descending letters: f, g, j, p, q, y. The underline is as thick as the stroke of a character, so decorative marks compete with signal marks. It's just too strong. That's why you see text underlined in homemade flyers but almost never in books, magazines, newspapers, or other things designed by pros. The recent addition to CSS to specify that underlines go behind the descenders is a welcome change. Professional web designers have the same aversion that print designers have, they are birds of a feather. But now they have another reason to hate it. Underlining has come to mean hyperlink. Because of their original aversion, they will often use CSS to remove that default underline, maybe bringing it back only when you hover over a link. But because it is still a widespread convention throughout the web, and probably always will be, they would never, ever emphasize something by underlining (they use border-bottom ;). Since you should underline something only if it is a link, which has its own markdown, and since underlining is ugly anyway, and since bold and italics are enough ammunition for all your emphasizing needs, and since it is an established convention from the old days that underlining meant eventual italics when it went to press, it's okay in my book to repurpose _underscores_ for italics. Slashes instead on both sides like /this/ --- hmm, it's not bad. I'm undecided.
JadeNB 7y ago
> Most word processors have underline as separate from underline. One of those words isn't supposed to be 'underline', right?
- eyegor 7y ago
  Probably meant italic and underline
  - Sniffnoy 7y ago
    Oops, yes, I did.

Vinnl 7y ago

Two minor notes: 1. "Semantic web" refers to data being linked and having meaning. You're referring to semantic HTML. 2. I don't think meant but more so - as I understood it, meant text that had to stand out from the rest, whereas meant that text was emphasised. Though I might be confusing it now with the retro-actively applied "semantics" of and . Totally agree with the overall point btw, and I do tend to use them in the way you described.

combatentropy 7y ago
> I don't think meant but more so I guess it was an HTML 4 thing, the standard at the time of Markdown, https://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/text.html#h-9.2.1 https://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/text.html#h-9.2.1 : emphasis. : stronger emphasis. I see that HTML 5 has tweaked their descriptions, https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/text-level-semantics.html#the-em-element https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/text-level-semantics.... : stress emphasis : strong importance, seriousness, or urgency
- cornishpixels 7y ago
 HTML 4 was not the standard at the time of Markdown. XHTML was.
- Vinnl 7y ago
 Huh, I guess it was. Anyway, it was all a whole lot of "semantics-washing" anyway; it's lot like people strictly adhere to strong rules of when text should appear bold or in italics anyway.
 - adrianhel 7y ago
 Agree. It's really missing the point of how this has been used in reality for the sake of promoting semantics in an area where semantics rarely matter.

samatman 7y ago

I'm enamored of the org-mode textual formatting convention: •bold︎•, /italic/, _underline_, =literal=, and ~strikethrough~. Although `literal` a la Markdown is arguably better, I prefer the other choices. Especially because org-mode lets you italicize //Face/Off// by adding more slashes, and so on for the others, like ==e = mc^2==. Incidentally, I have no idea how you're typing literal asterisks, I gave up and am kinda jealous.

bumbledraven 7y ago
Judging from the indenting, the poster used HN’s codeblock/verbatim formatting for the asterisks. https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
joshspankit 7y ago
/italic/ is also how it used to be done way back in the early BBS/MUD/MUSH days (along with _underline_)
- ksec 7y ago
  Yes I think this makes much more sense to me since the / operators align with how the characters in italic looks once it is applied ( Slightly tilted ) And underline. I dont understand why they aren't used that way any more.
SyrupThinker 7y ago
A small nitpick, its actually ~code~ and +strikethrough+ . [Official documentation](https://orgmode.org/org.html#Emphasis-and-Monospace https://orgmode.org/org.html#Emphasis-and-Monospace)
adrusi 7y ago
I really dislike /italic/. Relative to the slashes, the letters look like they're skewed in the wrong direction. Surely it should be \italic\. If unifying underlines and italics doesn't suit you.
- 7y ago

nabla9 7y ago

//italic// __underline__ **bold**

hamstergene 7y ago
This. Using doubles for markup removes the need for backslash escaping when those symbols naturally appear in text,

omnimus 7y ago

Because calling it italic and bold is WYSIWYG all over again something Markdown tried to cure. The proper way to think about is s emphasis and strong emphasis. As user you shouldn't be concerned by how it looks. Thats job of overall design and that might change depending where you publish / who designed it. You shouldn't make that decision because you don't have the required context. Italic will probably be the emphasis (although other designs are possible like change of color). Underline can be used for strong emphasis if it doesn't colide with links. Bold might be too jarring or not possible to use so designer might decide to not use it. There are also other ways to emphesise like small caps or inline background colors.

DougWebb 7y ago
As user you shouldn't be concerned by how it looks. Thats job of overall design and that might change depending where you publish / who designed it. You shouldn't make that decision because you don't have the required context. As the writer of Markdown content, you're often both the user of the content and the publisher of the content, so you do care about how it looks. Even if you're just the user, your intention when writing is to communicate something, and the eventual appearance of your content impacts how it is interpreted by the reader. So you still care about how your writing will look, which forces you to care about how the publishing process interprets the markdown syntax.
- omnimus 7y ago
  I am not saying you can't be both user and publisher. I am saying that these are two different processes often made by different people. When you publish book you have mostly zero power over how it will be designed. And honesty you should have zero power over it because there are people editors/designers/typesetters who dedicate their lives to exactly that. Better to let them handle it. Same goes for the web.
combatentropy 7y ago
Everything you say is true. I started making web pages 20 years ago. When I got a real job doing it in the mid-2000s, it was at the height of the push for semantic markup. Over the years I've come to think it is overwrought. First, I think they could have repurposed the old tags. can stand for "important," with a default style of italic, and could mean "bold" in the sense of "strong" or "outstanding", https://www.etymonline.com/word/bold https://www.etymonline.com/word/bold, with a default style of boldface type. You can still restyle them to your heart's content. Second, italic doesn't always mean emphatic. Like I said, it is also a formal convention for: titles (books, movies, magazines), ships, foreign words, legal cases, etc. (Only of large works. For articles and other small works, you quote them. So for example, The New York Times should be in italics, but any particular article, like "Chiefs Win Superbowl", should be in quotes.) Third, the tags are longer, especially instead of . It's noisy. A quibble, you might say. But so is this whole topic. And there is a line where coding goes from fun to tedious. Fourth, an asterisk looks stronger than an underscore anyway: *this* calls out more than _this_ So you could say underscores are emphasis and asterisks are stronger emphasis, even with just one on each side.

gmac 7y ago

Textile got this right: https://movabletype.org/documentation/author/textile-2-syntax.html https://movabletype.org/documentation/author/textile-2-synta...

Optimal_Persona 7y ago
You beat me to it, I always thought Textile was the Betamax to Markdown's VHS - technically superior but for whatever reason (actually John Gruber's visibility and GitHub's adoption of Markdown), Textile didn't really gain traction with users.

akkartik 7y ago

Slack and WhatsApp seem to be adding to your case, and they drive lots of usage.

kstenerud 7y ago

It's actually surprisingly difficult to get this kind of thing right. It seems perfectly obvious in hindsight, but while you're designing, little details like this get missed. When I started writing a spec for Concise Text Encoding [1], I figured it would take about 6 months to nail it down (yeah, right). Even now, 2 years later, I'm still making amendments to it because of various things I missed or got wrong. It's either something I happen to notice in one of my many, many re-reads, or something that another person notices after a few minutes reading it over, or something that comes up while I'm writing the reference implementation. Getting a spec right is a marathon affair. [1] https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/cte-specification.md https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ct...

funcDropShadow 7y ago
It seems to be an instance of Wadler's Law. > In any language design, the total time spent discussing > a feature in this list is proportional to two raised to > the power of its position. > 0. Semantics > 1. Syntax > 2. Lexical syntax > 3. Lexical syntax of comments https://wiki.haskell.org/Wadler's_Law https://wiki.haskell.org/Wadler's_Law