[akshayshah]

I like Markdown, and generally agree that it strikes a nice balance between correctness and usability...

...but it's delicious that this blog post also demonstrates an ambiguity in Markdown: how to handle intra-word emphasis. In the rendered output, "mark_up_" and "mark_down_" were probably intended to be "mark<em>up</em>" and "mark<em>down</em>", but the underscores were instead rendered literally.

I do appreciate that Markdown's solution to ambiguities like this is dead simple - just inline some HTML.

[AlienRobot]

I think it's delicious how nobody, absolutely nobody, wants _ to mean "emphasis," they want italics, and yet despite there being a markdown-to-HTML build step nobody has ever done what they were told they were supposed to do to circumvent the semantic issue and use <span class="italic"> instead of <em>.

It wouldn't even make sense for markdown if it were language-agnostic to output <em> when that's HTML-only.

I'm going to go to my grave repeating that <em> is just <i> version 2.

[akshayshah]

Totally fair. At least in part, I blame the choice of <em> and <strong>: it's really not clear what the hierarchy between them is, so I just think of them as the online versions of italic and bold.

<mild> and <strong>, or <em> and <emem> (or <double-em>, or <very-em>) might have been clearer, but at this point we'll never know.

Edit: apparently <i> has been redefined to be "the idiomatic text element" rather than just italic - so perhaps it's a semantically appropriate choice here after all! https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

[layer8]

<em> and <strong> were introduced as the supposedly semantic counterparts to the supposedly physical <i> and <b>. That never made a lot of sense, and then later <i> and <b> were redefined to be some subtly different semantic elements. Which also never really made sense. In the end, they both still mean italics and bold, unless you go out of your way to give them a different styling.

[BeetleB]

Ahem. Org mode user here. _ means underline :-)

Emphasis/italics is using /

[anildash]

I actually _did_ want the underscores, but enough people thought it wasn't intentional that I just gave up and changed it to italics. lol?

[akshayshah]

Alas! Once again, I’ve learned what happens when I assume.