Notices by CarlRJ (carlrj@hachyderm.io)

@sukima @atomicpoet @fediversenews @quephird we have 95 printable characters in the ASCII set, give or take, which isn’t too hard to work out on a 100ish key keyboard. What would make a better direct input solution for any of the tens of thousands of Unicode characters? Adding keys doesn’t scale.

We have an enormous number of symbols that it is good to be able to uniquely record in computers, but only a few handfuls we really need day-in/day-out. But I’m interested in alternate input solutions.

@sukima @atomicpoet @fediversenews @quephird but Markdown is not the solution to a typography problem, it’s the solution to a semantic problem - you want to indicate that •these words• are being emphasized, not that those individual letters are each being emphasized. There •is• a difference, which, as mentioned, gets highlighted by thins like screen readers and programs reading text.

Markdown is not a great solution, but it’s a good solution to use while seeking a better one.

@sukima @atomicpoet @fediversenews @quephird (1) using • around words for emphasis is not a standard, and, just like using individuallly underlined letters, cannot be easily understood by software. Markdown can - simply because of widespread adoption, it’s a standard of sorts.

(2) 50 years since what? Computers have been around far longer, Markdown •far• less long.

@MetalSamurai @sukima @atomicpoet @fediversenews @quephird it’s a little trickier - in Markdown, single asterisks, or single underscores, mean italics, while double asterisks mean bold. I can’t recall ever seeing italics done with slashes. Looks too much like Unix pathnames.

@MetalSamurai @sukima @atomicpoet @fediversenews @quephird it’s a shame that your fork of the Markdown code to change it to what you believe is the proper syntax, never caught on.

It wasn’t some big committee that “got it wrong”, it was a guy, who did it for his own use, so he could write blog posts as plain text, and it caught on.

You can write your own and attempt to win Markdown users over to your side, but it’s an uphill battle. Common usage often wins over “better” (see QWERTY vs Dvorak).

@MetalSamurai @sukima @atomicpoet @fediversenews @quephird I was on Usenet quite a bit in the 80’s and 90’s. I don’t recall a lot of slashes being used for italics. Gruber invented something for his own uses that caught on, and nobody jumped in with a clearly better solution, so this is what we have.

@sukima @atomicpoet @fediversenews @quephird replacing a word marked up by underlining, with Unicode underlined characters is not the right path to go down. The •only• thing that can “easily” parse those characters by default are human eyeballs. Those who need to use screen readers plus any software that searches the text will have trouble with those underlined characters.

@kkarhan @atomicpoet @fediversenews gee, and all this time, I thought it was @gruber who made Markdown.