And using semantic markup in a wrong way is even worse. There is no way to distinguish semantic and visual markup use of ''...''

When I started here, they were distinguished by putting semantic emphasis in ''double quotes'' and visual italics in <i>italic tags</i>.

Someone would probably change them to ''' or '' respectively, assuming ignorance on the part of the original editor. Hell, I would :)

Sure, but lots of people misuse other markup, too. We fix their markup instead of changing the functionality of the software to cater to them.

I'm glad you did, otherwise you and I could have been caught in an infinite loop :)

:-) Well, before the change in rendering, your changes would have been bad and mine good. Now they're the other way around.

I don't know about "misuse". We have a strong need for italics, and '' is a very convenient way of getting them.

Yeah.

:Indentation like this? Sure, that's what the colon in Wiki markup is designed for, as far as I know. I don't think there's even a better way of doing that?

Nope. That's the markup for a dictionary definition:

; Word : definition ; Word 2 : definition 2 ; Word 3 : long definition 3 : more of the long definition : even more ; Word 4 : definition 4

It is commonly used for indentation, and has a similar visual effect, but indentation would actually be something like this:

<p>Normal paragraph</p>

<p style="margin-left:2em;">Indented paragraph</p>

<p>Normal paragraph</p>