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Markdown having italics _italics_ bold bold instead of _italics_ bold was such a mistake. No idea how non-technical people were ever supposed to gr

Markdown having *italics* _italics_ **bold** __bold__ instead of _italics_ *bold* was such a mistake. No idea how non-technical people were ever supposed to grasp that.

dredmorbius 4y ago
Agreed. So does John McFarlane, the author of djot (and perhaps more widely known, Pandoc): <https://github.com/jgm/djot https://github.com/jgm/djot> My own convention when writing Markdown is to use single underbar for _italic_ and doubled star for **bold**. Except of course on GlitchSoc (a Mastodon server), where underbars give underscores, and single or doubled stars are for italic / bold respectively. But otherwise, if I see a singleton star or doubled underbar in my own writing, I'm pretty sure I've typoed something.
chrismorgan 4y ago
My observation of English-language typewriter and early plain-text computer usage (documents and emails) is that * was mostly used as equivalent to italics, ** and *** for stronger emphasis were not particularly uncommon (bearing in mind that traditionally there was simply no such thing as bold). But _ was kind of a historical oddity, with underlining used in lieu of italics in the typewriter era for technical reasons, implemented by means of overwriting; underscore-surrounding came much later, and never seemed particularly popular to me, and was more often interpreted as underlining rather than as italics—though the typewriter remarks are certainly still relevant, as underlining had for a while changed somewhat in semantics. I say Markdown’s error was doing anything with underscores at all, especially given the programming context and the prevalence of underscores in snake_case and SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE (Python being most heavily affected with its __magic__ methods, so that all implementations will be affected, rather than only some that have gone a certain way on word boundary matching), and it should have just been *italics* and **bold**. Semantically, view italics as emphasis and bold as strong emphasis (basically where HTML 4 headed with <em> and <strong>), and the doubling of the asterisk makes perfect sense. The asterisks are an intensity modifier.

Markdown having *italics* _italics_ **bold** __bold__ instead of _italics_ *bold* was such a mistake. No idea how non-technical people were ever supposed to gr

Markdown having *italics* _italics_ **bold** __bold__ instead of _italics_ *bold* was such a mistake. No idea how non-technical people were ever supposed to grasp that.

dredmorbius 4y ago

Agreed. So does John McFarlane, the author of djot (and perhaps more widely known, Pandoc): <https://github.com/jgm/djot https://github.com/jgm/djot> My own convention when writing Markdown is to use single underbar for _italic_ and doubled star for **bold**. Except of course on GlitchSoc (a Mastodon server), where underbars give underscores, and single or doubled stars are for italic / bold respectively. But otherwise, if I see a singleton star or doubled underbar in my own writing, I'm pretty sure I've typoed something.

chrismorgan 4y ago

My observation of English-language typewriter and early plain-text computer usage (documents and emails) is that * was mostly used as equivalent to italics, ** and *** for stronger emphasis were not particularly uncommon (bearing in mind that traditionally there was simply no such thing as bold). But _ was kind of a historical oddity, with underlining used in lieu of italics in the typewriter era for technical reasons, implemented by means of overwriting; underscore-surrounding came much later, and never seemed particularly popular to me, and was more often interpreted as underlining rather than as italics—though the typewriter remarks are certainly still relevant, as underlining had for a while changed somewhat in semantics. I say Markdown’s error was doing anything with underscores at all, especially given the programming context and the prevalence of underscores in snake_case and SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE (Python being most heavily affected with its __magic__ methods, so that all implementations will be affected, rather than only some that have gone a certain way on word boundary matching), and it should have just been *italics* and **bold**. Semantically, view italics as emphasis and bold as strong emphasis (basically where HTML 4 headed with <em> and <strong>), and the doubling of the asterisk makes perfect sense. The asterisks are an intensity modifier.