On 11/11/07, Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com wrote:
Why would we replace apostrophes with some other markup for *both* bold and italics? Why not just have say, asterisks for bold and leave apostrophes for italics?
If we're *replacing* (err, **replacing**) them, you're right. If we're
supplementing then we would want new symbols for both.
''' replaced by **. ''''' renders as an italic apostrophe. ''' still bold but supplemented by **. ''''' renders as bold-italics.
I actually quite like the idea of just supplementing, and possibly toning down some of the arcane apostrophe disambiguation. In case anyone hasn't seen the code, it's about 150 lines to process '' and '''. It's one line each to process // and **. We could probably reduce the 150 to 30 or so by only handling simple cases and forcing people to use // and ** for anything more complex.
The complex cases don't seem to work very well anyway (evidenced by people writing bold apstrophe as ''' ' ''' and using a stylised apostrophe for L''''arc de triomphe''' (and elsewhere, in my cursory glance). So we'd lose nothing, and gain something by having a simple, unambiguous syntax **in addition** to the current syntax.
**'** is the apstrophe character. It could also refer to... L'**arc de triomphe** signifie...
(It must also be said that if people simply wanted an unambiguous way of saying bold, they could just make a template: {{b|'}} is the..., L'{{b|arc de triomphe}}.... )
Steve