Comment by iamgioh

18 hours ago

Quarkdown author and project lead here. I started Quarkdown as a uni research project and couldn't imagine what it would end up being 2 years later. Thanks for engaging! I'll try and respond to your comments.

15 comments

iamgioh

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maxloh  16 hours ago

Would you consider "fixing" the bold syntax on v3?

I have always believed that instead of **bold** and *italic*, it should be *bold* and _italic_.

That extra asterisk is a poor design decision in markdown. It really makes it inconvenient to edit Markdown on a phone or tablet.

  • hnlmorg  12 hours ago

    It always bugs me that _underscore_ is the syntax for italics rather than underline.

    I’m sure back in the old days of READMEs, long before markdown was a thing, the conventions were this:

        /italics/

    _underline_

    *bold*

    • oneeyedpigeon  1 hour ago

      Since this seems to boil down to personal choice, has anyone considered a customisable alternative? Like a frontmatter that declares which character is bold, which is italic. You could easily convert between them according to local preference, much like tabs/spaces.

    • wahern  4 hours ago

      RFC 1855, Netiquette Guidelines[1], specifies underscore for underlining. However, it says asterisks are for emphasis, not bold, per se. They just happened to (often?) display as bold because italics in terminals weren't a common thing. For the same reason, using /'s for italics didn't make much sense except maybe in word processors. I also suspect underscore become conflated with asterisk because some people preferred using the former for emphasis--people weren't usually trying to adhere to professional styling guides, and some people may have preferred underlining to impart emphasis, or just got into the habit without thinking about it.

      I don't know how well RFC 1855 reflected common practice, though. It might be worthwhile to check the rendering code in clients like tin and mutt.

      [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1855

ASalazarMX  17 hours ago

It strikes me as odd to add functions to a text format, given that even in GUI documents macros are usually avoided. Was Quarkdown designed for complex and repetitive documents?

Thank you for volunteering to field questions.

  • iamgioh  13 hours ago

    Quarkdown was designed for control. Simple Markdown to define content, functions (LaTeX-style, but not macros!) for a declarative approach to document format and styling.

    Scripting came out naturally, so why not. Since v2 QD comes with a permission system that makes things safer.

    • drfloyd51  10 hours ago

      > why not?

      I wonder.

      > Since v2 QD comes with a permission system that makes things safer.

      That’s why not.

      You got your JavaScript in my HTML.

      Seriously though… it might be a useful feature. Or it could kill your product’s focus. Sincerely, good luck.