Typically, italic formatting indicates gentle emphasis, bold formatting indicates strong emphasis. Given this, * and * make sense. However, typically people use

Typically, italic formatting indicates gentle emphasis, bold formatting indicates strong emphasis. Given this, * and * make sense. However, typically people use _ for gentle emphasis in Markdown, which makes _even more_ sense. Be careful not to confuse specification of rendering, As for - and >, they've been in use in plain text email clients for bulleted lists and quotations for 35 years now [1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#:~:text=The%20convention%20of%20quoting%20was,%2D%2DJoe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#:~:text=The%20co...