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reaperducer • yesterday at 6:40 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

markdown tried very hard to encode conventions that were already used in Usenet, email, and other text media

For those of you who weren't there:

  *bold*

  _underline_

  ~strikethrough~

  /italics/

  > Quotation

  - list
  - list
  - list
I've been using these for almost half a century. They're much easier and more intuitive than Markdown. I see no compelling reason to change.

Replies

nostrademons • yesterday at 7:26 PM

Your quotation and list syntax should work out of the box in most Markdown flavors (HN has a very non-standard and crippled version - basically nothing other than italics, paragraphs, and code/preformatting works.)

Strikethrough and bold are doubled to avoid common ambiguities. Your underline should technically work, but it comes out as an <em> (emphasis) tag, which is rendered as italics in most browsers.

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beautron • today at 5:08 AM

One problem with the /italics/ form is that it's not convenient when writing about filesystem paths (though I do like its visual indication of slanting).

dingaling • yesterday at 7:29 PM

But Usenet style didn't have a trendy name, an 'inventor' or Github stars. So it didn't exist.

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