[ajdude]

I agree. I admit, I still /do this/ for emphasis, and have always wondered why Markdown didn't follow suit.

[masklinn]

Because Gruber used a different convention?

> While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters — including Setext, atx, Textile, reStructuredText, Grutatext, and EtText — the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.