The Leaning Tower of Markdown
June 27, 2014
You would think that any reasonable human being endeavoring to invent a light-weight markup format would look at _foo_ and naturally conclude without a second thought, that if it were to do anything at all, it would render as underlined text, i.e. foo. But apparently, if you happen to be John Gruber, the creator of the most popular markup format in use today, Markdown, that cold case of obviousness is somehow lost on you. Instead, Gruber decided it should do the exact same thing as the typically italicized emphasis markup *foo*.
Well, if you peruse the topic on the Internet you will discover why Gruber made this choice. Grammarians have decided that the two must mean the same thing. Their explanation for this certainly seems sound: Italics is a modern typesetting invention. Before typesetting the only way to emphasize was to underline. Hence they must mean the same thing. The rule is underline when writing and italicize when typing.
Does anyone see the flaw in this logic?
Let me give you a back-handed clue. Thanks to Markdown, when I am handwriting, guess what I find myself scribbling to show emphasis? Of course, I wrap the word is asterisks like *this*! Personally I don’t like using asterisks for this purpose. In the old days an asterisk was used for footnotes. Damn straight! But I (and I have no doubt a great many of you) have become accustom to it from persistent use. So I find myself doing it without even thinking.
So the glaring flaw in the grammarians logic —a flaw so big its actually hard to see, is the insistence that modern writing be held hostage by the arcane. The unfortunate result of this teaching is that Markdown has no means for underlining. Not only does this… but it prevents innovation.
If you ever have a chance to read the Tao of Pooh, I highly recommend it. An excellent book. In it, the author, Benjamin Hoff, doesn’t use italics, or bold, or even underscoring to draw emphasis. Instead he employs Capitalization. And to amazing effect. It comes off much more natural than you would ever expect and really adds to the beauty of the book. Now, imagine if the professional grammarians and Gruber had sway over the typesetting systems available to Mr. Hoff, such that there simply wasn’t an option to capitalize because it “meant the same thing” as italics. How much poorer the world would be!
I think there is a very valuable lesson to be had. It’s important to separate the capabilities of a tool from its Usage du Jour. Let a tool provide the raw capabilities. Let the user decide what to do with them —and what they should mean. All the rage today in tooling is to ensure proper semantic meaning, but meaning should about be as far a way from a machine as …
By the way, Redcarpet, Github’s markdown parser, does support an :underline configuration option. It sure would be nice if they turned it on! And if others followed suite.
Let me underscore that ;-)
sad little _foo_
how sad for you
to be underlined
is your sole pursuit
but regulated to lean
like an Italian Pisa
it would seem
never to truly be
a truly proper underling
in there lies the irony