snan

I didn't mean to step right into a fight here. I love markdown and I know there is a lot of hard work behind it (and projects adjacent to it)...

> I do think they _often_ are the right thing, but indeed, they aren’t always. To get `` or ``, you can type those in literally, because both original Markdown...

> I think/hope something Markdown-like will replace it. A bit of a reboot is necessary. I'm seeing a lot of sites switching over to wysiwyg or wysiwym but I'm not...

> In HTML, nested emphasis is used for “strong” emphasis, whereas the `strong` element means importance, seriousness, or urgency Wow, so it _is_ a subset of b after all!

> That impression is correct: though when going to LaTeX, it doesn’t really matter whether ``, `` or something else is used, no? These semantics matter when going to HTML,...

As alluded to upthread, we know that through the life-changing magic of CSS, em and strong aren't _strict_ subsets of i and b respectively. You can style it to use...

I'm also definitely not saying that **the** solution is that markdown's output for em and strong should instead always be i and b. I've tried avoiding taking that position in...

I love lua♥ We also discussed this for pandoc specifically [over on pandoc's issue tracker](https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/4297#issuecomment-534752313).

Here's just one idea (just green hat brainstorming for a solution here): What if `` and `` and ``, and their respective opening tags (attributes could be dropped) could be...

> I prefer the underscore for presentational elements, because it fits well with introducing underlined `u` when four of those characters are used. Intuitively I feel the same way; I...