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).
Much to my surprise, I see that Thunderbird displays them! So, we have both Installed Base and Least Astonishment.
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?
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!
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....