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Also discussed at wikimania, but decided against it.

''italics'' Neopolitan, looks like quote, less intuitive

How about "<whitespace-or-punctation-or-beginning-of-the line>bold<whitespace-or-punctation-or-end-of-the-line>"? -- RadomirDopieralski

Yes, those are both fine. -- ChuckSmith

" bold This might be problematic as it is a collision with bullet lists "

  • So might it be useful to pick another character instead of * ? MarkGaved - 30-Aug-06

Asterisk are a very deeply rooted tradition. Kind of. Usually single asterisks were used, though. I wonder if it's good to have "visual" formatting, like bold and italics, or better have "semantic" one, like ephasis and strong emphasis, like in html? -- RadomirDopieralski 2006-08-30

The semantic approach is IMHO the best one, but if people do not understand the semantic behind it, it is broken. At least in the case of bold and italics, it seems that people do not sense the semantics of emphasis and strong emphasis, and i don't use that either in that case. It confuses people. MediaWiki uses this concept with '''bold''' and ''italic'' but as soon as you combine the both it becomes a mess. I guess this syntax decission is the most criticized one in wikipedia, because it leads to counting single quotes: '''''bold and italic'''''

If we want the semantic approach, we need usecases on what people actually using the element for. You often see (at least in Germany) that books use italics when they introduce a new term in the book. That does not really correspond with the notion of weak emphasis.

--Christoph Sauer 01-Sep-06

I didn't do any special research, but my personal experience on wikis is that people just use "emphasis", and pick "bold" or "italics" according to personal taste, i.e. they are consistent about it: one person will use italics for emphasis, while another one prefers bold, and that person will even sometimes turn other's italics to bold "because that looks better".

The only cases I encountered when two separate emphasis methods were needed involved marking entries in a list -- and WikiBadges or even smilies could be used for this as well.

Maybe people just need one "emphasis"? I know that having more than one way to do something tends to slow people down.

-- RadomirDopieralski, 2006-09-01


It's my belief that the asterisks don't really collide with bullet lists, except in rare cases. You see, if we require that

  1. bullet lists start at first column, and
  2. bullet lists can't start with two asterisks (which probably makes sense, you can't start with a two-deep indentation anyway)

Then the only possible collision is the case where the user intends to start a line with a bold statement just right after a bullet list has finished - without a paragraph break. I.e.

* this is a bullet list
* This is a bullet list, too
**bold thingy**

However, I think the visual cue is quite enough for people. This, after all, looks more like a bullet list continuation than a bold thing. So it would be easy for an user to correct the problem and add an extra paragraph break.

-- JanneJalkanen, 2006-08-31

I agree with Janne. -- ChuckSmith, 2006-08-31

MeToo, it gets even clearer if you require whitespace (not necessarily single psace, just any whitespace) after the bullets. -- RadomirDopieralski, 2006-08-31

I think the page should clearly say whether we expect these to nest or not.

**//bold and italic//**
Yes or no? -- AlexSchroeder

The syntax decision made by MediaWiki for bold and italics is actually really bad for coding purposes... it turns out that just having the same symbols used for both bold and italics markers (which are commonly nested) makes it so we can't use an efficient, formal parser. Worse than just counting quotes, the problem comes from these two lines:

'''''Bold and italics''' just italics''
'''''Bold and italics'' just bold'''

Believe it or not, it's theoretically impossible to parse this into a useful syntax-tree format without unlimited lookahead capabilities (you can't decide whether to start bold or italics first) - and using unlimited lookahead every time we use bold or italics has a real performance penalty. You can manage this with a two-pass parser, but I think it just ends up forcing unnecessary complexity into the programming side.

Besides, I think it's much more intuitive to use **bold** and //italics//... as noted below, there's only one case where **bold** and bullet lists can conflict, and it's visually obvious. Also, //italics// don't need to conflict with URLs - raw URLs should usually be <pre>-style things or links. When the user really wants a raw URL in the text, this can actually be parsed pretty simply; all the parser needs to do is to recognize URLs as special. This is really easy, as the problematic URLs are very easy for a parser to recognize - MediaWiki actually does an excellent job of this when detecting so-called "freelinks".

-- EPAstor

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« This particular version was published on 05-Sep-2006 08:04 by Christoph.