On Tue, Apr 25, 2006 at 07:27:46PM -0400, William Allen Simpson wrote:
Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
On Tue, Apr 25, 2006 at 07:21:37PM +0200, Tels wrote:
Wouldn't that be *bold*, _underlined_ and /italics/? :-P
In general, no. Handwritten underlines are customarily rendered in print as italics, hence that mapping. You're right; the extra flexibility would be nice, but it doesn't match what I most commonly see people do, and that was my goal. It makes no sense changing markup just for fun; mine was an Installed Base attempt to conform with the Principle of Least Astonishment.
Actually, Jay, you must not go back in usenet far enough, because those actually *WERE* the old markup. Underscores are _underlines_ and slashes are /italics/ (probably because of the association with slant).
1983, though DejaGoo doesn't seem to be able to find any of my postings earlier than dec 85. People who used /this marking/ were, IME, substantially in the minority.
Much to my surprise, I see that Thunderbird displays them! So, we have both Installed Base and Least Astonishment.
Does it, really? Cool!
Admittedly, I also like <parameter>, but that got hijacked by some newfangled thing or other. Apparently, somebody thought the standard [n|t]roff markups aren't good enough?
I dunno.
However, a bunch of us stopped using usenet somewhere around 1988, when it became unusable with too much useless traffic. (I hear it's gotten worse.) Mailing lists are far better!
No, it's not. No, they're not.
If you think Usenet is useless, you're a) not using slrn or haven't figured out how to score, or b) hanging out in the wrong newsgroups.
I'd be in favor of bringing the usenet markups here, and reverting '' to "<em>" and ''' to "<strong>", as I seem to remember from not-so-long-ago around wikidom.
But first, even better to get a firm grasp on the existing syntax....
You missed the part where I said that I don't ever expect MWtext to change, right? Don't go getting *me* in trouble, here... :-)
Cheers, -- jra