Bold And Italics Reasoning

There's an argument to MakeTheMachineWorkHarder and not specify bold or italic presentation, but rather specify "emphasis", "alternate title", etc. The way a heading for instance is presented is not up to users but the service.

Bold options:

*bold*
**bold**
__bold__
'''bold'''

Italic options:

/italics/
//italics//
_italics_
''italics''

A star (*) is the most used symbol to bold text online. However it is used to specify unordered lists almost universally in wikis, so this is an overload. Bolding with stars at the start of a line is ambiguous. See Talk.BoldAndItalicsReasoning.

A slash (/) looks like slanted italics, so some see it as intuitive and thus easier to remember. Double symbols are generally used in Creole to avoid accidentally parsing text not meant to be parsed. However, anyone using the net already knows that a slash indicates a hierarchy, as in a published URL in the media, and that a double slash indicates a protocol, as in any URL whatsoever. See Talk.BoldAndItalicsReasoning.

The underscore (_) was not chosen, because that could be confused for underlining. However, there remains no way to underline and this may yet be used for that. See Talk.BoldAndItalicsReasoning.

The double single quote ('') and triple single quote (''') were not chosen, because they could be confused for a regular quotemark (") and is not clear that it is for emphasis. Also, having to use quintuple quotes (''''') to open and close bold italics gets really confusing to some users. There is however a vast amount of data in this form and both tikiwiki and mediawiki use the double single quote for italics, so it could be supported for backwards compatibility for those who strongly object to use of slash and star.