On Tue, Apr 25, 2006 at 07:27:46PM -0400, William Allen Simpson wrote:
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).
1983, though DejaGoo doesn't seem to be able to find any of my postings
earlier than dec 85. People who used /this marking/ were, IME,
substantially in the minority.
Much to my surprise, I see that Thunderbird displays
them! So, we have
both Installed Base and Least Astonishment.
Does it, really? Cool!
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?
I dunno.
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!
No, it's not. No, they're not.
If you think Usenet is useless, you're a) not using slrn or haven't
figured out how to score, or b) hanging out in the wrong newsgroups.
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....
You missed the part where I said that I don't ever expect MWtext to
change, right? Don't go getting *me* in trouble, here... :-)
Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth jra(a)baylink.com
Designer Baylink RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates The Things I Think '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA
http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet and in e-mail?