[bjeanes]

> My biggest complaint is that asterisks map to <strong> and underscores map to <em> (in HTML terms). This is not backwards-compatible with Markdown where (asterisk)foo(asterisk) gets you <em>foo</em>, and it feels objectively backwards, if that makes sense. I wonder if there's any chance they could reverse that.

Interesting. I suspect something like this will always be subjective, but I find the opposite to be true. *bold* and _italics_ make the most sense to me and is always what I wished Markdown did.

Probably, this is because I was familiar with Textile[1] before I used Markdown, and this is what it does.

Today, Slack also uses this convention instead of the Markdown convention (though I believe it _used_ to use the latter).

[1]: https://textile-lang.com/

[Cyberdog]

> Interesting. I suspect something like this will always be subjective, but I find the opposite to be true. bold and _italics_ make the most sense to me and is always what I wished Markdown did.

Yeah… After posting that message, I remembered that _foo_ in Markdown also results in <em>foo</em> - so the underscores are backwards-compatible. But I've just always used asterisks so I completely forgot about it. So I guess they were bound to make some people upset no matter which one they made <em> and which one they made <strong>, and I'm on the losing side. :P

Whatever. If this ends up taking over the world as Markdown did (and I hope it does), I'll just get used to it, I suppose.

Incidentally, how did you "deactivate" HN's parsing of the asterisks in your reply?

[robocat]

> Incidentally, how did you "deactivate" HN's parsing of the asterisks in your reply?

Click the small “help” link on your own profile page: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Cyberdog

The help link also shows if you re-edit a comment.

[bjeanes]

I just preceded the asterisks with a backslash.