If I may, I'd like to add something older than either one - emphasis. I, personally associate *this* with emphasis, and I associate bold text with emphasis... but that doesn't mean I want *this* and '''this''' to be combined. I also happen to associate ALL CAPS TEXT WITH EMPHASIS - BUT I DON'T WANT MEDIAWIKI TO AUTOMATICALLY CONVERT ALL CAPS TO BOLD, DO I? No, I don't. I think *this* sort of emphasis is a fundamentally different sort of subconscious emphasis than '''this''' (where I expect that to mean bold to you) unrelated to any sort of conflicts. Also, '''this''' is something I never encountered before MediaWiki software, yet it somehow made sense that ''this'' is emphasized, '''this''' is more so, and finally '''''this''''' is most so. Whereas /this/ doesn't really make sense...
Another sort of related topic to bring up - the whole idea behind CSS applies here, also. <em> and <i> do the same thing, right? Wrong. <i> is a formatting control, which I believe technically shouldn't even be in HTML - <em> is a content control, saying 'this text is important'. This is also important for alternative browsing - audible, or any sort of non-visual or non-textual browsing, where <i> means absolutely nothing, but <em> means emphasized. In the same way, I understand fundamentally that ''this'' or '''this''' or '''''this'''''' are different levels of in-line emphasized text, not headings like ==this==, but DIFFERENT from the text around them. In other words, emphasized. However, /this/ and *this* are mere formatting controls - exactly what the entire web standards movement is fighting against. Yes, /this/ sort of logically slants text - but that is all. It merely slants text. Unless you directly associate slanted text with emphasis, /this/ IN AND OF ITSELF doesn't emphasize the text, as doesn't *this*! Just another thought to consider before considering the leap to that sort of formatting...
On Apr 27, 2006, at 1:30 PM, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
On Thu, Apr 27, 2006 at 05:08:30PM -0400, Pedro de Medeiros wrote:
See my other message: the actual issue is when people *type an example of a regular expression into a wikipage*. While that may not happen much on Wikipedia, remember that Not All Mediawikiae Are Wikipedia, a rule that's pertinent when discussing this category of topic.
It is then an exception, not a rule. Suppose you have a programming language X that uses some of the same markup wiki uses and you want to list some example source code in that language, should you change the wiki markup not to create conflict or just quote the source code? I guess the latter, so why things should be different for regular expressions?
Well, as the other poster notes: *URL's*. The issue is twofold: which item is more newly defined, and which one is more common.
There might be good reasons for not using /slashes/, I just think this was not one of them. :)
URLs are definitely a better example, but as Mr Cable notes, there are *lots* of programming wikis; overloading /RE/ is about as bad as overloading /U/R/L.
And since we *can* avoid it, we pretty much *must* avoid it.
Cheers,
-- jra
Jay R. Ashworth jra@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 normallyread 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?
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