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So the intuition for _ would be underlining! Pretty simple. Where would your intuition jump to for underlining in markdown if _ is italics? Em is just another
by eviks 3y ago
So the intuition for _ would be underlining! Pretty simple. Where would your intuition jump to for underlining in markdown if _ is italics?
Em is just another bad term - which of the emphasis styles do you mean?
Re popularity - so what? How does widespread bad turns into intuitive good?
Bear notes used / for italics, also Orgmode (is that geek enough for you?)
- kazinator 3y ago> Where would your intuition jump to for underlining in markdown if _ is italics? You have you know the fact that actual underlining had been traditionally used as a substitute for italics in hand-written and typewritten papers. As in, in a citation, when you give a title of a book, you underline it, unless using a word processor with fonts, in which case you use italics. Learned this in high school.
- eviks 3y agoDid they teach you in high school the relevance of that history? Does the fact that it'd been traditionally used as a substitute mean you can't use underlining now, so it should not event exist in markup?
- kazinator 3y agoIt's pretty obvious that underlining is something that rarely appears in print. It is mainly an annotation device: something added to finished print, by hand. When was the last time you saw underlines in a book that weren't added by a previous reader? Underlines are bad typography that should be used sparingly, if ever.
- eviks 3y agoIt's even more obvious that we're not talking about print, but a markup language anyone can outside of book publishing. So why do you want to prevent a "previous reader" from using said annotation device for the little note he's creating/editing?
- kazinator 3y agoSorry, how did we get here from explaining the intuition behind _..._ denoting italics?
- eviks 3y agoWe got here because you mentioned all the irrelevant stuff your learned in high school, and when I pointed that out, you mentioned some more, now about the whole underline, which I used as an example of how there is no intuition behind _ since that intuition is "taken" by underlines (that's why you needed to criticize underlines)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]