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Comment by hnlmorg

16 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*

6 comments

hnlmorg

Reply
wahern  8 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

oneeyedpigeon  5 hours 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.

Cadwhisker  14 hours ago

My /usr/bin/ folder wants to know which bit gets italicised :)

  • oneeyedpigeon  5 hours ago

    I know this is a throwaway joke, but I was interested anyway...

    According to my own local Markdown formatters, the answer would be both "usr" and "bin", with the surrounding slashes removed, but the internal slash remaining. In other words:

    usr/bin

    (but underlined instead of italic!)

    Of course, this problem is nothing new since a filename might easily be named `_my_file_`.