jim said:
Leading and following underscores are not plain text.
sure they are. indeed, the underscore even falls in the 7-bit range. so it's as plain-text as plain-text can be, and it has a long and glorious tradition of indicating emphasis.
It is an encoding to signal to the reader that something is missing -- namely italics.
actually, i think of it as an indicator to the "rendering agent" -- a.k.a. the viewer-program -- that the surrounded text is to be displayed with emphasis. (which generally means italics.)
One could have just as well -- or as badly -- used [i]and[/i] as the signals to indicate to the reader that italics is missing.
i used square-brackets rather than angle-brackets in the quote, but i could have used angle-brackets just like you did, jim... and yes, sir, any of those will work. indeed, .html uses the angle-brackets, and many bulletin-board systems use the square-brackets. and this is fine, because they use those brackets as _markup_, with no intention that the brackets will actually be _seen_ by any human beings. and likewise, i don't intend my underscores to be seen by human beings. just like .html, or forum markup, i expect that a viewer-app will intercede and display the emphasis just as i had intended. however -- and this is a very big _however_ -- in the case that those underscores _are_ being seen by actual human beings, it's not really all that much of a problem, because underscores are relatively non-intrusive, and they seem to provide emphasis, which is why they developed -- spontaneously -- for that purpose. the brackets, on the other hand, are terribly intrusive, and only obliterate the text to be emphasized, rather than emphasize it. likewise, the other bracket commands all serve as _obstacles_ to a human being who happens to be reading the text, and even to those human beings who have to work with the text in other capacities, such as editing it. z.m.l., on the other hand, is zen. that's why light-markup systems are taking over the world now.
I don't doubt that eventually the reader can get used to what they're missing -- but why should they have to?
they shouldn't. that's why i have programmed the viewer-apps that ensure that people don't have to read z.m.l. in its raw form.
If it were really that hard to much more closely follow author's intent then I could understand the trade-offs. But with today's technology it really wouldn't be hard to do much better.
i agree. we can do much better than what we have been handed. -bowerbird