[grimman]

> They both transform to the most sensible html given the input.

I'm going to have to disagree with you. Long before Markdown came along, the convention was to use asterisks for * bold *, slashes for /italics/ and underscores for _underlined_ text. And that's just for starters.

Those three examples perfectly convey the intended effect, quite unlike the Markdown versions where asterisks will somehow imply italics, but only if they're single asterisks? It's a strange thing!

[treve]

The point is that bold, italics, underline are all a property of the style, but not intent. The intent is "emphasis". How emphasis is rendered is dependent on the stylesheet.

[kayamon]

If the intent is simply "emphasis", why are there different ways of expressing it?