underscore and italic policy

[Sam Joseph]

Hi Michel,

Michel Fortin wrote:


> Le 30 juin 2006 à 16:51, A. Pagaltzis a écrit :

>

>> The only reason that this hasn’t changed, I think, is that

>> unfortunately no new releases have happened in a long time.

>

> I'm not sure that's the only reason. John has been reluctant to  

> change this part of the syntax now that we're past version 1.0 and  

> that some people may be using that particular feature.


Do we have any *actual* examples of people using this feature


> In my opinion, the backward compatibility argument has merit,  

> especially since in some languages (like Japanese) "words" aren't  

> separated by a space character like in western languages. Such a  

> change would break any emphasis already written with underscores in  

> these languages; someone would have to either manually edit all of  

> the texts to change underscores to asterisks or stick to the current  

> version of Markdown.


I understand your point in principle, but I don't think Japanese 
websites actually use italic.  I read and write Japanese and my wife is 
Japanese and we've never seen italics used in a Japanese language 
website.  Although of course it's conceivable it's used somwhere we 
haven't seen, and of course we can't speak for other languages which 
don't use spaces.


> On the other side, I admit that I've changed the behaviour when  

> making PHP Markdown Extra and got only positive comments about it.  

> This particular problem seems to pop up regularly both on this list  

> and in emails I receive. I think this was the main reason I decided  

> to implement the change to my "Extra" syntax, were backward  

> compatibility was less of an issue.


Makes sense - I've created a patch for ruby BlueCloth which implements 
Markdown, and will run my own "no embedded italics" in our site.


> Here is what I think could be a good, long-term solution: Markdown  

> (the syntax) could change and remove underscore-emphasis within words  

> while Markdown (the tool) could offer a "backward-compatible mode"  

> preserving the old behaviour. This would solve the issue while still  

> giving the possibility to upgrade Markdown to those relying on the  

> old syntax, with the only hassle of setting a configuration variable. 


Sounds like a reasonable proposal, although clearly there are now 
multiple Markdown tools.   I guess that John is the only person who can 
make changes to the actual standard, whereas individual maintainers of 
tools are responsible for changes to the tools ...

CHEERS> SAM