It has been proposed, informally, that wikitext be modified to prefer, and then eventually require, new markers for bold and italic text inline.
Two suggested, and very similar approaches, are currently on the table:
//italics//, **bold**, //**bold** italics//
and
/italics/, *bold*, /*bold* italics/
Could you each please post your personal favorite hobby-horse counter case which you feel would make parsing these constructs difficult so we can all pick it apart?
I'll start:
Everyone says that *bold* (ie: using the single character versions in general) would conflict with the use of asterisks for list marking. To see how big a problem this would actually be entails finding out how many bold markings occur at the beginning of hard parapgraphs, since list items *must* be at the beginning of a hard paragraph, and then determining how hard it would be to distinguish them.
I see three cases:
*List item
Easy: only one asterisk, beginning of graf. Obviously list item.
*Bold sentence.*
Also easy, asterisk at beginning of graf is matched by one that's just before white space. This one's probably the hardest, you have to look ahead a fair piece to find the matching bold-off to be sure.
*list item with a *bold* word
Similarly easy; the bold word tags are matched. This one would be harder if list items were regularly very long; in my experience, they're not.
No, four:
The only thing that makes this difficult, as far as I can see, is if you want to permit turning off bold mid-word, like this:
But can you really call it *truth*iness?
I know we probably permit that now, but it does deprive us of "bold-off is an asterisk followed by a \W token" rule that makes other things easy.
So again: is "turning bold and italics off between two alphanumeric characters" a thing which actually *happens*, much?
Cheers, -- jra