Markua does confirm what I said before:
This is unfortunate, since underline is not always just a typewriter version of italics. In some languages and in some contexts, underlining serves a distinct, legitimate purpose.
Underlined text is indeed a legitimate purpose, and CommonMark has to consider that.
If CommonMark were to override the
_syntax it would need to be turned off by default, creating divergence between documents that render emphasis one way and documents that render it another.
@chrisalley It is a breaking change, but the question is how bad this change would be?
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The inventors of markdown decided to render emphasized text in italic and strong-emphasized text in bold, and I consider that unfair because we already have 2 different ways to write emphasized/strong emphasized text, but despite that, they didn’t specify anything to be rendered as underlined, and that’s probably due to their Anglophonic backgrounds, and I totally understand that underlined text isn’t a common/recommended way to write emphasized text in English.
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Underlined text is still considered to be emphasized text, at the end we will just change the way some emphasized text in old documents is rendered, but it will remain emphasized, so this is not a big deal, remember that!
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It’s rare for anybody to use
__text__instead of**text**.
I think I made my point.
Edit: Yes I’m aware that browsers render <strong> in bold and <em> in italic by default.