Query about emphasis

[Joseph Lorenzo Hall]

Markdown 2.0?

On Sunday, June 21, 2009, Simon Bull <waysoftheearth at yahoo.com.au> wrote:

> Hello List,

>

> Firstly, I was very impressed when I tried markdown 2.0 recently.  Fantastic work all!

>

> I have a query about the treatment of emphasis.

>

> I realise that the horse has bolted, and changes to currently supported functionality are unlikely to attract support.  However, there does seem (at least in my tiny mind) to be a mis-match between the following stated goal and the present implementation of emphasis:

>

>

> Quote (from http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#philosophy):

>     Markdown’s syntax is comprised entirely of punctuation characters, which punctuation characters have been carefully chosen so as to look like what they mean.

>

>

> It seems to me that *writers* who are not programmers are thinking in terms of italic, bold, underlined, or stuckout text and so on.  A *writer* is not thinking about abstract concepts like <em> or <strong> or any HTML at all.

>

> During a process of "marking down" some informally structured text files in order to get them into HTML, I have encountered the following "syntax" :

>

>     Here is some plain text that looks /italic/.

>     Here is some plain text that looks -s-t-r-u-c-k-o-u-t-.

>     Here is some plain text that looks _underlined_.

>     Here is some plain text that looks *bold*.

>

> This issue I see is that stylistic information intended by the author is lost by the current implementation.  Markdown supports only two flavours of emphasis (<em> and <strong>) while writers can intend at least the four flavours of emphasis mentioned above (bold, italic, underlined, struck out).  I.e., information is "lost in translation".

>

> Also, there is no guarantee that browsers will render <em> or <strong> in the style intended by the author, because <em> and <strong> have intentionally been abstracted away from the writer's concepts of bold, italic, underlined and so on.  I don't see that those abstractions are helpful where readability of the plain text source file, and the goal quoted (above) are the primary concerns.

>

> One possible solution to my issue would be something like this:

>

>     /some text/         -->  <font style="italic">some text</font>

>     -s-o-m-e-t-e-x-t-   -->  <font style="struckout">some text</font>

>     _some text_         -->  <font style="underline">some text</font>

>     *some text*         -->  <font style="bold">some text</font>

>

> I anticipate that there probably won't be much appetite for changing the markdown tool, so I intend to have a go at implementing the above for my own "local" markdown (with approximately zero knowledge of Python).  However, I would be interested what other list members think about this?  Does anyone else see it as an issue or not?

>

> Thanks all, and GREAT WORK markdown team!

>

> Simon

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-- 
Joseph Lorenzo Hall
ACCURATE Postdoctoral Research Associate
UC Berkeley School of Information
Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy
http://josephhall.org/