Comment by omnimus
6 years ago
Because calling it italic and bold is WYSIWYG all over again something Markdown tried to cure.
The proper way to think about is s emphasis and strong emphasis. As user you shouldn't be concerned by how it looks. Thats job of overall design and that might change depending where you publish / who designed it. You shouldn't make that decision because you don't have the required context.
Italic will probably be the emphasis (although other designs are possible like change of color). Underline can be used for strong emphasis if it doesn't colide with links. Bold might be too jarring or not possible to use so designer might decide to not use it.
There are also other ways to emphesise like small caps or inline background colors.
As user you shouldn't be concerned by how it looks. Thats job of overall design and that might change depending where you publish / who designed it. You shouldn't make that decision because you don't have the required context.
As the writer of Markdown content, you're often both the user of the content and the publisher of the content, so you do care about how it looks. Even if you're just the user, your intention when writing is to communicate something, and the eventual appearance of your content impacts how it is interpreted by the reader. So you still care about how your writing will look, which forces you to care about how the publishing process interprets the markdown syntax.
I am not saying you can't be both user and publisher. I am saying that these are two different processes often made by different people.
When you publish book you have mostly zero power over how it will be designed. And honesty you should have zero power over it because there are people editors/designers/typesetters who dedicate their lives to exactly that. Better to let them handle it. Same goes for the web.
You have to choose one or the other, semantics or formatting. There's a standard way to format a book title: italics. You have to be able to say "format this with italics" or "this is a book title."
A system that prefers semantic tags such as "emphasis" and bans direct formatting such as "italics" only works if you can import or define a semantic tag for "book title" that you know will be formatted correctly. It doesn't make sense to tag a book title with "emphasis," because there are a lot of different ways to express emphasis, and only one of them works (quite coincidentally) for a book title.
Yes but i think we would both agree that in html/markdown it should be "this is book title" because medium allows it. "format this with italics" makes as little sense as "format this with emphasis" they are both wrong. Interestingly "format this with italics" is right solution in print because we encode that meaning in aesthetics and conventions and i guess thats why people think it is also right solution in web. But even in typesetting program that book title will have class .book-title and same italic in footnotes will be .footnote.book-title
Everything you say is true. I started making web pages 20 years ago. When I got a real job doing it in the mid-2000s, it was at the height of the push for semantic markup. Over the years I've come to think it is overwrought.
First, I think they could have repurposed the old tags. <i> can stand for "important," with a default style of italic, and <b> could mean "bold" in the sense of "strong" or "outstanding", https://www.etymonline.com/word/bold, with a default style of boldface type. You can still restyle them to your heart's content.
Second, italic doesn't always mean emphatic. Like I said, it is also a formal convention for: titles (books, movies, magazines), ships, foreign words, legal cases, etc. (Only of large works. For articles and other small works, you quote them. So for example, The New York Times should be in italics, but any particular article, like "Chiefs Win Superbowl", should be in quotes.)
Third, the tags are longer, especially <strong> instead of <b>. It's noisy. A quibble, you might say. But so is this whole topic. And there is a line where coding goes from fun to tedious.
Fourth, an asterisk looks stronger than an underscore anyway:
calls out more than
So you could say underscores are emphasis and asterisks are stronger emphasis, even with just one on each side.
I am very aware of the formal conventions in print but thats not the problem here. Especially in html those cases should be marked differently (like with span.class) so that can be understood by machine or screenreader.
There can any number things set in italic on page and none of them have to use <em>.
"italic doesn't always mean emphatic" is exactly the reason why i say think of it as emphasis not as italic.
Also emphasis/strong in html is mainly for general emphasis in paragraphs of text. It works pretty much like h1 and h2. The difference is that you have only two levels.
> As user you shouldn't be concerned by how it looks
I'm a user and I care a lot about how my documents look.
Yes and often times how they look will be out of your hands. You publish in magazine and their editor+designer will change your underlines to italic and your italics to bold because thats how it makes sense in their publication.
Of course you are both writer and publisher you are also in control of the design. But when you are writing you shouldn't be thinking about how to present the text. These are almost always different processes (except rarer things like poetry or experimental prose that rely on whitespace). Write > edit > present/design.