Italics get used to express important semantic meaning, so unicode should support them

[Kent Karlsson]

> 23 dec. 2020 kl. 01:14 skrev Martin J. Dürst via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org>:
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> ...
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>> Nowadays, presto chango, most email clients support rich text (in HTML, usually), and you get to _underscore_, /italicize/, and *bold* your text correctly whenever you want to, and even change the font size to SHOUT, if you want.
> 
> These show up styled in HTML, most probably because Ken used the text editor to style them that way. The plaintext version contains ASCII email styling characters (but the HTML version doesn't), and my guess is that they were added when the mailer produced the plaintext version.
> 
> Your mailer and your mileage may vary.

That kind of markup now goes by the name ”markdown” (apparently, I don’t like that name, the pun only(?) works in English), and each system has their own variant. Wikipedia has one, various chat platforms have theirs (all likely slightly different), Trac has its variant, Jira has its variant of this, etc. etc. Some have bullet lists, some not, some have headings perhaps allowing different levels, some allow for strike-over. At which point the ”markdown” is converted to (e.g) HTML (or other more robust markup) may vary. It’s the Wild Wild West. And it is not at all robust, mishaps easily happen and may be hard to get out of. But I agree it is handy (easy to type on the keyboard), most often it works as intended but not always…

/Kent K


> Regards,   Martin.