Multiple multiplication signs can be used with spaces, x * y * z.
Markdown makes no mention of italics. It speaks of emphasis and strong emphasis. Underscore and asterisk are interchangeable, doubling gets the strong variant. Using slashes for italics doesn't fit into that scheme.
Yeah, I'm fine with that, it's a bad original design decision to waste two symbols for the same thing in the first place, and the subtle _foo_bar vs foobar differences go against the simple nature of the markup
All these _foo_bar intricacies should be dealt with via escaping (or an even better alternative design of using some other marker types like _[] to allow free use of the marks)
> Using slashes for italics doesn't fit into that scheme
Sure, because that's a bad scheme, and not mentioning such a common thing as italics doesn't help either since the whole point is visual intuitiveness, so markdown still fails here (and adds a needless cost of 2 extra symbols "for the strength")
> Underscore and asterisk are interchangeable, doubling gets the strong variant.
But you've just shown that they aren't
That's programmer-think, while markdown was meant to cope with existing conventions as much as possible. Markdown was primarily a pragmatic thing that worked with people writing without needing to think of many rules, and that's exactly why it got so popular.
Wanting /italics/ is just your opinion, not some objective ideal.
> Markdown was primarily a pragmatic thing that worked with people writing without needing to think of many rules, and that's exactly why it got so popular.
That's wishful thinking, the whitespacing, especially in such common thing as lists, is something that requires thinking. And with urls it's a common fail to forget which () [] go where. And there is nothing pragmatic/conventions about this strong/emphasis nonsense, that's just following HTML <em> spec, none of common email/blog post plain text writers think in HTML standard, they think in terms of bold/italic/underline
> Wanting /italics/ is just your opinion, not some objective ideal.
Wanting is not an opinion, it's a desire. Also /italics/ is objectively more intuitive
But also asterisk is a common form for multiplication just like / is for division/separation (which is more common than paths)
So you already have this design issue, but on the other hand at least you could have the benefit of visually intuitive markup, which isn't the case with markdown