Re: Improved (non-annoying) underlining

[Karl Kleinpaste <karl@charcoal.com>]

Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:
> wrong here, as *emphasis like this* and *emphasis* *like* *this* do in
> fact have very different meanings, a difference of meaning that's lost by
> converting that emphasis into font changes.

Well, the whole situation is rather like old-style "ASCII art": People
would generate complex quasi-monochrome pictures based on printer
character density to get a weird greyscale kind of graphic.  It only
had any meaning before real graphic support existed for common folk.
So _this_ /kind/ of *emphasis* is the "ASCII art" way of _*showing*_
_/real/_ */typographical/* _*/variation/*_.

The fact that people expect *this emphasis* to be semantically
different from *this* *emphasis* is an indication that they've
forgotten that the concept being transmitted to the reader was
typographical variation, so the ASCII art has become an end in itself,
because there's literally no manifestation of this supposed differing
semantic in any venue other than text/plain emphasizers.

To each his own...

:-),
--karl