Re: OT: Gmail (was Re: Conlang Flag art links)

Eric Christopherson wrote:
> On May 26, 2008, at 8:21 PM, Sai Emrys wrote:
>
>> On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 5:57 PM, Eric Christopherson
>> <rakko@...>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Here're links to the original discussions:
>>>> http://archives.conlang.info/pu/zhoelfau/bhuebordhoen.html
>>>> http://archives.*conlang*.info/gha/dhoelthaen/fhelwhoelkhoen.html
>>>>
>>> Presumably you need to take the asterisks out of the second one.
>>>
>> Yeah. Google search of archives.conlang.info bolded it, which
>> stayed in
>> gmail when pasted. Boo.
>>
>> - Sai
>
> Ugh. I really hate how Google Chat treats ** and __ specially like
> that. I didn't realize that extended to its email.
>
> When you *view* an email with an asterisked word, does it show up as
> bold (and not show the asterisks at all)?
A *lot* of email clients do that in their default setting, and some even
can't disable it. It's a pity, especially because (other than in
automatic conversions) I've *never* seen anyone use asterisks to
represent bold text --- people *always* use capital letters for it.
Asterisks denote emphasis, which is correctly italicised (hence, plain
text conventions are *more* expressive than the formatted conventions
they seek to emulate, as foreign terms and book titles, conventionally
italicised, are set off by _underscores_ in plain text).

(There's a lot of people who use bold when they should be using italics,
but the fact that *asterisks* are pretty much unnoticeable until you're
directly looking at them, just like italic text, and the fact that
CAPITAL LETTERS stand out from the surrounding text, just like bold,
mean that the asterisk = italic, caps = bold is the only logical behavior.)

PS: "Asterisk" is a hard word to say, especially if you read "Asterix"
books before you learnt the -isk form.

--
Tristan.

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