3 ms·

> Why is italics italics* and bold is bold? Why not bold and _italics_. That would make a lot more sense to me.* I think that comes from separating content a

> Why is italics italics* and bold is *bold*? Why not bold and _italics_. That would make a lot more sense to me.* I think that comes from separating content and style, indicating meaning rather than explicit style: it isn't really one asterisk for italic and two for bold, it is one for emphasis and two for strong emphasis and the renderer choses how to display those levels. Like using HTML's “em” and “strong” tags instead of explicit “i” and “b” tags.

oniony 1y ago
Back on Fidonet/Aminet/Spot on the Amiga in the 1990s, pre-internet, the convention was /italic/, *bold* and _underline_. This was much more intuitive for me than what we have today.
- zygentoma 1y ago
  That's also how I did it in IRC times, when nothing would actually formatted by this It still looks good even without any formatting! (And btw. I thought that was the intention of markdown …)
  - dspillett 1y ago
    The problem is that markdown has no real standard. Well, it does, but not everything follows it because many things existed before the formal standard and many created since are made to be compatible with something that pre-dates the standard. Some optimise for matching stylistic intent (bold, italic, underscore) and others prefer to be more abstract (emphasis, sting emphasis), and yet more try to support both but that requires compromise and they don't all compromise the same way. Many interpreters will accept underscores for italic, though they still generally (but not always) require two asterisks for bold. I just accept it as a general idea, not a standard, and lookup the local conventions for whatever tool I'm using at the time. Or if I'm writing a translator, I prioritise converting things written how I personally prefer to write plain text documentation.
    - oniony 1y ago
      I think hyperlinks killed the underline. Underline was pretty popular when I was younger. We'd underline the dates in our exercise books, it was used for emphasis in textbooks, &c. But when hyperlinks adopted underline as the default style then nobody would use them for anything else any more, as otherwise you'd have people clicking on things thinking they were links when they weren't. I'm guessing that's when people decided to render _this_ as italic rather than underline, perhaps web based IRC clients started it. But then everyone stopped rendering links with underlines, so it died in vain. (I suppose it /is/ still used as a hover effect sometimes, inconsistently.) And now nobody really uses underline for anything at all. It's kinda dormant waiting for its renaissance.
      - dspillett 1y ago
        Underline was already reducing in use away from handwritten work (I still use it on handwritten notes today, as I think do many people), before hyperlinks were a common UX element outside of academia. It was common on typewritten works mainly because it was easy and reliable - just backspace and press the underscore key. Italics were not an option on typewriters and other daisy based printers and bold wasn't as easy (to get a good result you needed to go back multiple times), at least not without an electronic typewriter (which often automated underline and bold). With word processors and dot-matrix printers (even on some electronic typewriters) bold (sometimes multiple levels of bold) and italic became more practical, as did changing font size for titles, so we had more options and people increasingly preferred others over underlining.
- kevinrineer 1y ago
  Thanks for teaching me some history. I've been using org markup for all my personal notes and have been pleasantly using /italic/, bold, _underline_, etc.
- collingreen 1y ago
  Bbcode, baby!
- n4r9 1y ago
  I remember some places having ~strikeout~, which was surprisingly useful.
  - dspillett 1y ago
    This is not uncommon as a markdown extension. It is available in many chat apps that offer markdown-like syntax, both Discord (with double ~) and WhatsApp support it for instance.
- yencabulator 1y ago
  Markdown specifically wanted to work with pathnames. UNIX config files are in /etc/
rogual 1y ago
Thing is, italic and bold don't have just one meaning. Italic can mean: emphasis, foreign word, word which is being defined for the first time, title of referenced work, mathematical variable, and many field-specific uses. Bold can mean: strong emphasis, term that needs to stand out and be found easily while scanning, mathematical vector, and again, field-specific uses. If a markup language only has tags for emphasis and strong emphasis, then you can't put bold or italics for any of the other reasons you might want to use them, so anyone wanting to do those things can only misuse the emphasis and strong-emphasis markup, so it de-facto starts to mean bold/italic anyway. It's at least reasonable to propose a markup language where you have to say "this is emphasis, this is a foreign word, this is a title of a referenced work," etc. but not everybody is writing a document that needs that much metadata. At least HTML retained and when it introduced and . Styles, like words, can have several meanings, and forcing authors to separate them feels a bit like forcing them to write the word "set" differently for each of its 10+ meanings.
- dspillett 1y ago
 > At least HTML retained and when it introduced and . That is not as practical with markdown though, as you are working with a limited set of practical character combinations. > Styles, like words, can have several meanings This is one of the reasons why there are many markdown alternatives that behave slightly differently: not everyone writes plain text mark-up with the same intentions. This isn't something you can solve with a single markdown version, so we have to accept that each could, and probably will, work a little differently.

> Why is italics italics* and bold is *bold*? Why not bold and _italics_. That would make a lot more sense to me.* I think that comes from separating content a

oniony 1y ago

Back on Fidonet/Aminet/Spot on the Amiga in the 1990s, pre-internet, the convention was /italic/, *bold* and _underline_. This was much more intuitive for me than what we have today.

zygentoma 1y ago
That's also how I did it in IRC times, when nothing would actually formatted by this It still looks good even without any formatting! (And btw. I thought that was the intention of markdown …)
- dspillett 1y ago
  The problem is that markdown has no real standard. Well, it does, but not everything follows it because many things existed before the formal standard and many created since are made to be compatible with something that pre-dates the standard. Some optimise for matching stylistic intent (bold, italic, underscore) and others prefer to be more abstract (emphasis, sting emphasis), and yet more try to support both but that requires compromise and they don't all compromise the same way. Many interpreters will accept underscores for italic, though they still generally (but not always) require two asterisks for bold. I just accept it as a general idea, not a standard, and lookup the local conventions for whatever tool I'm using at the time. Or if I'm writing a translator, I prioritise converting things written how I personally prefer to write plain text documentation.
  - oniony 1y ago
    I think hyperlinks killed the underline. Underline was pretty popular when I was younger. We'd underline the dates in our exercise books, it was used for emphasis in textbooks, &c. But when hyperlinks adopted underline as the default style then nobody would use them for anything else any more, as otherwise you'd have people clicking on things thinking they were links when they weren't. I'm guessing that's when people decided to render _this_ as italic rather than underline, perhaps web based IRC clients started it. But then everyone stopped rendering links with underlines, so it died in vain. (I suppose it /is/ still used as a hover effect sometimes, inconsistently.) And now nobody really uses underline for anything at all. It's kinda dormant waiting for its renaissance.
    - dspillett 1y ago
      Underline was already reducing in use away from handwritten work (I still use it on handwritten notes today, as I think do many people), before hyperlinks were a common UX element outside of academia. It was common on typewritten works mainly because it was easy and reliable - just backspace and press the underscore key. Italics were not an option on typewriters and other daisy based printers and bold wasn't as easy (to get a good result you needed to go back multiple times), at least not without an electronic typewriter (which often automated underline and bold). With word processors and dot-matrix printers (even on some electronic typewriters) bold (sometimes multiple levels of bold) and italic became more practical, as did changing font size for titles, so we had more options and people increasingly preferred others over underlining.
kevinrineer 1y ago
Thanks for teaching me some history. I've been using org markup for all my personal notes and have been pleasantly using /italic/, bold, _underline_, etc.
collingreen 1y ago
Bbcode, baby!
n4r9 1y ago
I remember some places having ~strikeout~, which was surprisingly useful.
- dspillett 1y ago
  This is not uncommon as a markdown extension. It is available in many chat apps that offer markdown-like syntax, both Discord (with double ~) and WhatsApp support it for instance.
yencabulator 1y ago
Markdown specifically wanted to work with pathnames. UNIX config files are in /etc/

rogual 1y ago

Thing is, italic and bold don't have just one meaning. Italic can mean: emphasis, foreign word, word which is being defined for the first time, title of referenced work, mathematical variable, and many field-specific uses. Bold can mean: strong emphasis, term that needs to stand out and be found easily while scanning, mathematical vector, and again, field-specific uses. If a markup language only has tags for emphasis and strong emphasis, then you can't put bold or italics for any of the other reasons you might want to use them, so anyone wanting to do those things can only misuse the emphasis and strong-emphasis markup, so it de-facto starts to mean bold/italic anyway. It's at least reasonable to propose a markup language where you have to say "this is emphasis, this is a foreign word, this is a title of a referenced work," etc. but not everybody is writing a document that needs that much metadata. At least HTML retained and when it introduced and . Styles, like words, can have several meanings, and forcing authors to separate them feels a bit like forcing them to write the word "set" differently for each of its 10+ meanings.

dspillett 1y ago
> At least HTML retained and when it introduced and . That is not as practical with markdown though, as you are working with a limited set of practical character combinations. > Styles, like words, can have several meanings This is one of the reasons why there are many markdown alternatives that behave slightly differently: not everyone writes plain text mark-up with the same intentions. This isn't something you can solve with a single markdown version, so we have to accept that each could, and probably will, work a little differently.