bcj

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bcj @bcj10/12/2022, 9:30 PM

colin @vogon

Natalie @nex310/12/2022, 9:00 PM

pet peeve of the now:

Platforms that use Markdown-like syntax for formatting text but aren't actually compatible with Markdown. Gaze with me into the maw of madness:

	`_foo_`	`foo`	`foo`
Markdown	italic	italic	bold
Google Chat	italic	bold	unstyled
Facebook Messenger	italic	bold	bold & unstyled
Slack	italic	bold	bold
Backloggd	underline	italic	bold

These aren't even consistent enough that I can reliably remember "okay I should always use this one particular syntax for italics and that at least will always work". Nothing will always work. Life is suffering. At least Cohost is an island of standards-compliance in an ocean of nightmares.

colin @vogon10/12/2022, 9:06 PM

my original philosophy behind this as someone pushing 40 was that my canonical ASCII renderings of bold, italic, and underline are *bold*, /italic/, and _underline_, which doesn't agree with any other site on the internet, so we might as well at least obey CommonMark

bcj @bcj10/12/2022, 9:30 PM

Ok, but I think Google Chat is right

Or rather, it is following a completely different lineage that predates Markdown. Google Chat is copying, among other things, MSN Messenger¹ and that is 5 years older than Markdown is. Markdown allowing _italic_ or *italic* feels like it is probably specifically appeasing chat apps using _italic_ even if it favours *italic*.

Underline and italic often traditionally had the same syntactic meaning. In Copy-editing you signal that something should be italicized by underlining it and apparently some publishers still use underline to mean italic pre-typesetting.

John Gruber chose wrong and now we all have to suffer for it²

I'm assuming they took it from ICQ or AIM. And that one of those two got if from an earlier predecessor. I just know MSN did it because I was trying to work out where I picked up that convention just last week.
There is a decent argument to make that in text where underscores may reasonably appear within words (e.g., variables, usernames), having underscore italicize causes too many problem.

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in reply to @nex3's post:

@hayley10/12/2022, 9:10 PM

ok. ok. i gotta ask. why is _foo_ not universally "underline". that feels like such a gimme

Natalie @nex310/12/2022, 9:19 PM

The glib answer is "because of John Gruber's whims in 2004". If I had to guess what his motivation was, though: semantic HTML was a big cause celebre at that point, and Markdown specifically produced semantic tags like  and  rather than . There isn't a semantic underline tag (probably because the only semantic notion it communicates is "emphasis", which is already covered by ). So from the perspective of Markdown as specifically a gloss for HTML, rather than a syntax for expressing text formatting, it does make a degree of sense.

colin @vogon10/12/2022, 9:28 PM

yeah I think you can see remnants of a very early-2000s typography of hypertext in there: there is a single concept of emphasis with three levels (italics = single emphasis; bold = double emphasis; bold-italics = triple emphasis, for emergencies only), and underlines graphically overload hyperlinks so you should avoid them altogether

Nire Bryce @NireBryce10/12/2022, 10:04 PM

the other thing is that markdown is terrible to write a parser for your first time around, and there's a chance people were optimizing for 'ease of not having to write yet another case for *\_ parsing

adrienne @adrienne10/13/2022, 2:52 AM

Well, and Gruber comes from a typesetting background, in which underline is literally just a substitute for italics in contexts where it's not available. They're semantically equivalent

philosophy major (derogatory (reclamative))@nullpat10/12/2022, 9:57 PM

I think facebook messenger also only supports formatting in the web version and not in any of the apps

ash @hierarchon10/13/2022, 3:49 AM

and then of course there's emacs org-mode (which, to be fair, precedes markdown by decades)

Lotte 'just an idiot' May @LotteMakesStuff10/13/2022, 5:21 AM

Semi-related: I HATE chat apps that are like ‘oh you typed a word with *fucking stars* around it? Better do some STYLE.. no I am adding little cute stars for emphasis myself! Drives me crazy when slack does that and has fucking UI buttons right next to the text box. I want the text box to work like a text box and not do magic transformations ever. There is no good reason for a regular ass chat box to use markdown-like magic formatting

in reply to @vogon's post:

Jeran @Jeran10/12/2022, 9:29 PM

im sorry, but as a netizen of the 2000s, *verb* is for RP text. *glomps* not glomps . =text= should be bold, as its a doubling of a line, similar to how bolding was achieved on typewriters (by typing over the same letter more than once). Skeuomorphism!

unrelated, but i love that you grow up thinking "this is how the world has rules" and computers are some of the most rule following places that exist, and then you discover the nature of protocols, and nobody is speaking the same language.

@garak10/12/2022, 9:39 PM

It's easier for me to switch gears to e.g. wiki text because it's so different: ''italics'', '''bold'''. My problem with markdown variants is that they are ''almost'' the same, so it's harder to tell which context I'm in. Every uncommon syntax must be re-learned each time.

And don't get me started on New Reddit vs Classical Reddit.

Izvy Raspberry @Izvy10/12/2022, 10:05 PM

im young and dont know what ASCII is but i use *bold*, /italic/', and _underline_ all the time because regardless of if its supported or not people instantly know what i meant reading it

edit: how do you do the code quote thing?

colin @vogon10/12/2022, 10:07 PM

backtick! the symbol you get when you don't hold down shift while typing ~

Izvy Raspberry @Izvy10/12/2022, 10:54 PM

thank you!