I really like your proposal, but in the days of USENET the // wasn't interpreted by the machine but simply by our minds, just like * for bold. Would there be any extra issues caused by italics being / rather than *?

I'm honestly with you on this and I'm in the middle of building a huge Markdown site where I have the freedom to change the syntax now if I want.

I'd like to see

  *this is bold*
  /this is italics/
  _this is underlined_

Beyond simple conventions like this, I'd just as soon drop into HTML as deal with some other markup that ends up being just as complex. We don't need to allow permutations and combinations such as bold and italics, double-weight bold, etc. these never occur in normal prose typesetting and if you need it just use HTML for those rare cases.

Underlining is an emphasis hack for mechanical typewriters or in handwriting. There's no reason to use it typographically in something which has all the layout possibilities of a modern computer or printer.

https://practicaltypography.com/underlining.html

Except to indicate something new and modern which needs its own visual distinction… like hyperlinks. Using underlining as the default for hyperlinks was genius.

Purely anecdotal but I always waste a second clicking something I believed was a link because it was underlined.

> Underlining is an emphasis hack for mechanical typewriters or in handwriting. There's no reason to use it typographically in something which has all the layout possibilities of a modern computer or printer.

The argument presented by that link is valid for paragraphs and valid for printed content.

On a website, underlining single words or short phrases doesn't make them less unreadable, it draws attention to them.

Like with hyperlinks; the displayed form of `[See here](http://here.com) for more inform` is undeniably better than simply `see here for more info` and leave the reader guessing which of those words is the text and which is a hyperlink.

The problem is exacerbated on mobile where the reader cannot hover a mouse over the words to determine which words are a link and which are not.

If you're writing a full paragraph like this:

"Our previous stories of FooBarFactory Inc were well-received by our readers. Investigative Journalism has always been a core principle of PotatoNews. The images and video that our beloved readers shared on Twitter are only a single component in the fight against big corps polluting our environment."

In the above paragraph, "previous stories" is a link, "FooBarFactory" is a link, "well-received" is a link, "images and video" is a link, "Twitter" is a link and "Polluting out environment" is a link.

The advice from Practical Typography would render that entire paragraph free of any indication that there's more for the user to read.

As a point of order;

\* more than 3\/4's of people may not feel that way, particularly those discussing snake\_case Vs CamelCase

That’s PascalCase, camelCase does not capitalize the first word.

Turns out that it's a contentious topic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camel_case

FWIW I use the same nomenclature as you, but that doesn't make it universal.

New rule needs ~ when * or _ is used inside words, so your example wouldn't need escaping. E.g.,

dis~/cuss/~ing

with a similar caveat for 'obvious' fractions and divisions?

You mean ¾?

Only if you can do that for, say, 937\/997.

937⁄997

You need U+2044 FRACTION SLASH.

I honestly had no idea you could do that in Unicode with arbitrary values. Thank you.

This is what Org mode does. It's still very tied to Emacs, but there's an effort to standardize the Org format. Hopefully this will help its adoption outside of Emacs, it's a nice markup (and a lot more).

"why /usr/bin/vi" turns /usr/bin into italic ?"

underlines is not used enough to take the commonly used character ~this is fine~, trailing tilde is rare enough

But I like to write paths like /usr/bin/ in my text and don’t want to worry about backtick code quoting them every time

Most people don't write file paths. Only a concern for programmers, who should be fine escaping them by whatever mechanism.

Most people don’t write markdown! What’s the demographic of markdown writers who don’t write file paths? Bloggers?

this may be a huge number, because Evernote and a lot of note applications relying on markdown.

> Evernote

Since when?

I apologise, I confused it.

Notion users, Reddit users, etc.

I will say that forward slashes are still more common in regular english text even among non-programmers than underscores. For example, listing options a/b/c.

And you know, URLs.

I don’t really think of Notion as “markdown” but I suppose you’re right since we support a bunch of markdown conventions. Some things are different though like `> ` is a toggle block, and `” ` a quote block. Unfortunately we already abuse / for a command menu, which is by far my least favorite feature. I want to make a setting to disable it but it goes against our anti-settings philosophy.

And in markdown you chuck them between backticks to indicate they're verbatim text to be rendered in monospace.

> "And in markdown you chuck them between backticks to indicate they're verbatim text to be rendered in monospace."

Only if the intent is for the URL to be copy/pasted, otherwise you enclose the URL in <url> or [text](url) to make it clickable.

Most markdown implementations make URLs clickable without the angle brackets.

Uh.. what about all those non programmers that write URLs?

I think many/most people use slashes more often than they use asterisks, however.

Sure, but a slash before and after a word? I don’t think that’s common outside of file paths.

Not even common including file paths, unless you mean directory paths. Even then, only necessary if you really want to unambiguously indicate a directory in the path itself.

Using slashes for a short/small/abbreviated list is relatively common. For example, the top post on the hiring thread right now is for a "Full-stack/frontend/product engineer". There's another one describing a "M/W/Th" hybrid schedule.

no, but most people definitely use links in their texts and they have the same problem. / is also regularly used for fractions or/and in a situation where you could use two words

This is a real problem considering that some programmers are just sloppy with code-quoting paths and such. And it’s even debatable whether (sort of stylistically) you should even code-quote paths.

There's the same problem with variables and filenames containing 2+ underscores, resulting in unwanted italics.

That at least is rarer than paths.

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

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.

Do you have some reference for “simple swipe on B”? Doesn’t work for me (not that simple I guess?)

They're probably referring to the iPad keyboard (https://www.ghacks.net/2019/08/02/how-to-enable-the-swipe-ke...)

Why would a _ be harder to type than a * on a screen keyboard?

same difficulty on mine, just switch into alternate character page and both need no shifting or button holding there, no idea what he's on about.

In IPA, slashes are used for abstract phonemic notation ( pronunciation guides). Converting that to <em> would be annoying for certain communities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...

There's the concept of escaping notation using a single backslash: \

So:

  **strong text** -> bold "strong text"
  
  \*\*doubled splats\*\* -> "doubled splats" w/ "**" on either side

This is also cumbersome to type, but at least there's a path to what you want to present even if the character is reserved for markup.

Yes. I'm less concerned about it being cumbersome to write than I am about it being cumbersome to read.

And again, this complaint will only be relevant in contexts where this specific convention is used.

rare enough to not matter

Usage of `_` and `-` keys are dead simple home-row keys on Dvorak keyboards. I’ve never switched layouts because most are focused on prose, but programming demands a lot of snake & kebab casing. …not that `/` is too far away.

> Back in the days of USENET one common choice was using a / to delimit /emphasis/ - the usual reading was that this indicated words that would normally be rendered as /italics/.

Fuck no. Same idiocy as turning -- into long em, makes writing any technical posts mighty annoying

Get better screen keyboard. On mine _ doesn't require shift, neither does *