Delirium wrote:
Andrew Rodland wrote:
I had guessed that it might find some use in fr -- It's too bad to hear that it's "widely" used. However, I should note that it's not _required_. <nowiki> resolves the ambiguity nicely. The fact that it takes 17 characters is, well, unfortunate, but it's _correct_. The workaround, on the other hand, does bad things to the language, and makes the implementation of a more advanced parser exceedingly difficult.
I'm not sure if it would be a more or less drastic change, but making bold be four tics instead of three would also solve the problem.
That would solve the problem only if we can somehow automatically convert all existing articles that use triple-apostrophes to mean "bold". That's not worth it.
My suggestion would instead be to use ""..."" to mean "bold". This would not interfere with ''...'' at all. We could have both '''...''' and ""..."" for the transition period, and once all use of '''...''' has been removed (which would be a long long time), the syntax can be deprecated. This, too, I don't think would be worth it, but on the other hand, I just ''know'' that someone is going to write a script to do the conversion automatically.
Then without lookahead: 2 tics is italics; 3 ticks is an apostrophe plus italics; 4 tics is bold; 5 tics is an apostrophe plus bold; 6 tics is bold and italic; and 7 tics is an apostrophe plus bold and italic.
How do you know that 5 tics isn't a single apostrophe wrapped in italics? :)