Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
On Sat, Nov 10, 2007 at 01:04:37PM +1100, Steve Bennett wrote:
On 11/10/07, Simetrical Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:
I would view bold italics with adjacent apostrophes as a corner case. The behavior in that case makes very little sense and I doubt it's being widely used.
There's one obvious use: French. Eg: L''''arc de triomphe de l'Étoile''' appelé...
(though interestingly when I got to that page, the initial ' was actually a ')
But yes, clearer, unambiguous syntax that didn't rely on arbitrary processing rules would be good.
For example one might define a character like _ which represents a non-joining non-space. So the above could be written L'_'''arc de triomphe''' which would be clearer and unambiguous.
Or, and here's an idea I don't see much, we could define **bold** and //italics// as *additional* ways to punctuate such things, and keep the old ones until they wither and die.
L'//arc de Triompe// would be *entirely* unambiguous.
Then people could be using L'<i>arc de Triompe</i> (or L'<b>arc de Triompe</b> for the original wikitext).
That's something guaranteed not to change. You don't even need a parser! :D