# Why there is no syntax for subscript and supscript?

**URL:** <https://talk.commonmark.org/t/why-there-is-no-syntax-for-subscript-and-supscript/586>\
**Category:** Extensions\
**Created:** [September 13, 2014, 9:00am UTC](https://talk.commonmark.org/t/why-there-is-no-syntax-for-subscript-and-supscript/586 "2014-09-13T09:00:30Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 10

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**Author:** ![Burt\_Harris](https://cdn.commonmark.org/user_avatar/talk.commonmark.org/burt_harris/32/368_2.png) [@Burt\_Harris](https://talk.commonmark.org/u/Burt_Harris)\
**Post date:** [September 13, 2014, 5:29pm UTC](https://talk.commonmark.org/t/why-there-is-no-syntax-for-subscript-and-supscript/586/10 "2014-09-13T17:29:04Z")

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My opinion: superscripts and underlines are two fine examples of where resorting to new syntactic sugar extensions is not justified in the core CommonMark language.

That’s because simple existing HTML formatting tags like `<sub>` (and `<u>`) are compatible with many existing markdown implementations, and don’t look to out-of-place in plain text.

On the other hand, defining a namespace qualified language-escape extension mechanism, is the kind of topic worthy of a CommonMark extension. I thinking about ways you could indicate to an extended CommonMark processor that you wanted to switch for a while into a math-savvy language, chemistry savvy language, or even table-savvy language .

See the topic on [CURIEs](http://talk.commonmark.org/t/namspacing-with-compact-uris-curies/553?u=burt_harris) and see if you see what I mean.

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