Talk.Bold And Italics

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

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