# "\_" and "\*" being synonymous is redundant and confusing

**URL:** <https://talk.commonmark.org/t/--and-being-synonymous-is-redundant-and-confusing/282>\
**Category:** Spec\
**Created:** [September 4, 2014, 11:43am UTC](https://talk.commonmark.org/t/--and-being-synonymous-is-redundant-and-confusing/282 "2014-09-04T11:43:02Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 16

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**Author:** ![rwzy](https://cdn.commonmark.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v2/letter/r/3d9bf3/32.png) [@rwzy](https://talk.commonmark.org/u/rwzy)\
**Post date:** [September 8, 2014, 12:36am UTC](https://talk.commonmark.org/t/--and-being-synonymous-is-redundant-and-confusing/282/16 "2014-09-08T00:36:17Z")

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Your quote highlights why your proposition is a bad idea; it’s semantically incorrect. ` __text__ ` is _strongly emphasized_ due to being surrounded by double underscores. The `<i>` tag [does not mean strong emphasis/importance](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/i).

Not about ‘bold’ or ‘italics’, it’s about emphasis and importance. In which case you could only argue for `_` as emphasis and `*` as importance. This would be incompatible with having double asterisks or double underscores as means of indicating importance, resulting in _massive_ backwards compatibility issues.

Not to mention that your proposal from the beginning already breaks _many, many_ existing documents and implementations. (Everyone’s single asterisk wrapped text would be changed from being in `<em>` tags to being in `<strong>` tags, and vice versa for double underscore wrapped text.)

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