If I may, I'd like to add something older than either one - emphasis.
I, personally associate *this* with emphasis, and I associate bold
text with emphasis... but that doesn't mean I want *this* and
'''this''' to be combined. I also happen to associate ALL CAPS
TEXT
WITH EMPHASIS - BUT I DON'T WANT MEDIAWIKI TO AUTOMATICALLY CONVERT
ALL CAPS TO BOLD, DO I? No, I don't. I think *this* sort of emphasis
is a fundamentally different sort of subconscious emphasis than
'''this''' (where I expect that to mean bold to you) unrelated to
any
sort of conflicts. Also, '''this''' is something I never
encountered
before MediaWiki software, yet it somehow made sense that ''this'' is
emphasized, '''this''' is more so, and finally
'''''this''''' is most
so. Whereas /this/ doesn't really make sense...
Another sort of related topic to bring up - the whole idea behind CSS
applies here, also. <em> and <i> do the same thing, right? Wrong. <i>
is a formatting control, which I believe technically shouldn't even
be in HTML - <em> is a content control, saying 'this text is
important'. This is also important for alternative browsing -
audible, or any sort of non-visual or non-textual browsing, where <i>
means absolutely nothing, but <em> means emphasized. In the same way,
I understand fundamentally that ''this'' or
'''this''' or
'''''this'''''' are different levels of
in-line emphasized text, not
headings like ==this==, but DIFFERENT from the text around them. In
other words, emphasized. However, /this/ and *this* are mere
formatting controls - exactly what the entire web standards movement
is fighting against. Yes, /this/ sort of logically slants text - but
that is all. It merely slants text. Unless you directly associate
slanted text with emphasis, /this/ IN AND OF ITSELF doesn't emphasize
the text, as doesn't *this*! Just another thought to consider before
considering the leap to that sort of formatting...
On Apr 27, 2006, at 1:30 PM, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
On Thu, Apr 27, 2006 at 05:08:30PM -0400, Pedro de
Medeiros wrote:
See my
other message: the actual issue is when people *type an
example
of a regular expression into a wikipage*. While that may not happen
much on Wikipedia, remember that Not All Mediawikiae Are
Wikipedia, a
rule that's pertinent when discussing this category of topic.
It is then an exception, not a rule. Suppose you have a programming
language X that uses some of the same markup wiki uses and you
want to
list some example source code in that language, should you change the
wiki markup not to create conflict or just quote the source code? I
guess the latter, so why things should be different for regular
expressions?
Well, as the other poster notes: *URL's*. The issue is twofold: which
item is more newly defined, and which one is more common.
There might be good reasons for not using
/slashes/, I just think
this
was not one of them. :)
URLs are definitely a better example, but as Mr Cable notes, there are
*lots* of programming wikis; overloading /RE/ is about as bad as
overloading /U/R/L.
And since we *can* avoid it, we pretty much *must* avoid it.
Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth
jra(a)baylink.com
Designer
Baylink RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates The Things I
Think '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA
http://baylink.pitas.com +1
727 647 1274
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally
read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet and in e-mail?
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