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Comment by spxdcz | Hacker News Reader

I don't think Jeff Atwood was asking for additional features, merely fixing some of the obvious issues with the original specification: anyone who has used it a couple of times will have run into the weird_filename_italics_thing.

If the down button on the Apple Remote didn't work, that wouldn't be 'minimalism', it would be broken.

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And a case in point: I reckon that the word 'simply' in the first sentence of the blog article should be 'simple' (ok, so it could make sense with either word, but 'simple' would be more readable).

Now, should the author correct the mistake? Or would that not respect the 'minimalism' with which it was written? We wouldn't want to have to produce a feature-bloated version 2 of the article, would we?

You are correct, I should have typed simple, it is fixed now, thanks for the correction.

Anyone who has been bitten by that one a couple times will just do the sane thing and escape the underscores or use backtick code tags around the words you need to have underscores in.

It would only be _obviously_ wrong if it didn't even let you workaround the format characters.

I'm not sure why you think escaping is an obvious and suitable concept for a simple markup language like Markdown.

When trying to write a grammar that describes Markdown escaping is the obvious and suitable solution.

Its because its so simple that it causes the surprising behavior. But it is only surprising the first time. After that you realize that everything between two underscores means highlight that section of text. If you actually wanted the underscores you have to do it manually, whats wrong with that?

The common case should be simple. How often do I want to italicize part of a word? That's what should require escaping.

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