On 11/29/07, Andrew Dunbar hippytrail@gmail.com wrote:
There should probably be basic semantics for clear cut cases such as balanced unambiguous italic and bold markers, with anything unbalanced or ambiguous being left to the language- or wiki-specific semantic stage.
This way we can have the common-sense ''italics'' and '''bold''' and treat everything else as a special case which may be determined by the wiki. This might in theory even make proper handling of double apostrophes in Neapolitan possible.
Interesting thought.
<sp>''foo, foo''<sp>, <sp>''<sp> -> guaranteed italics <sp>'''foo, foo'''<sp>, <sp>'''<sp> -> guaranteed bold foo''foo -> language-dependent, possibly literal (for neapolitan) foo'''foo -> language-dependent, possibly apostrophe-italic (for French, Italian etc)
'''' -> always apostrophe-bold? ''''' -> guaranteed bold-italics '''''' -> ? as present, apostrophes bold-italics
Personally, I'm not too fond of the 4-apostrophe rule, as this is unintuitive: * ''''four''''
If a person meant that to mean anything, they probably want the "four" in bold, surrounded by unbolded apostrophes. But they actually get the second apostrophe in bold. So I would suggest:
<sp>''''foo -> apostrophe, bold. foo''''<sp> -> bold, apostrophe <sp>''''<sp> -> ? there's no good reason why it should be apostrophe, bold. rendering it as double apostrophe seems as reasonable to me as anything else.
Steve