On 9/13/06, Tels nospam-abuse@bloodgate.com wrote:
It violates the KISS principle. That means humans have now to match/balance
- on a line to find out whether a leading * will make a list, or something
bold etc. Ugh.
They would have to balance *double* asterisks only. The assumption is that these will virtually never occur except when intended to be markup. Since bolding markup is normally used in matched pairs, there's not really any problem except if someone habitually fails to close their bold markup, and unclosed bold markup probably shouldn't render as bold altogether (to force people to match asterisks *all* the time so they don't get confused when it doesn't work at the beginning of a line).