a case for native bounding asterisk support

[Allan Odgaard]

On 4 Jun 2020, at 5:29, Christian Perry wrote:

> To move the conversation forward, I propose an alternative markdown
> italicized syntax: *bounding double exclamation marks*.
>
> For example: Huzzah, we can !!finally!! use bounding asterisks again!
> *celebrates with much rejoicing*

The widespread convention in “my circles” prior to Markdown (mailing 
lists related to the Amiga), was *bold*, /italic/, and _underline_.

Curiously Markdown appropriated the convention for both *bold* and 
_underline_ as italic (emphasized).

But it’s obviously far too late to do anything about it now, as there 
are thousands of parsers that use this convention, not to mention the 
untold amount of user content that would render incorrectly, if the core 
syntax of markdown was redefined.

Instead you need to lobby the various online communication platforms not 
to force markdown upon you as the only markup language, at least they 
should offer you a way to disable it.