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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 th

• 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/