In this question: Helper: loose vs. lose I added a comment with the following markup:
clarification: by “should be pronounced *loss*” do you mean
“should rhyme with *dose*” or “should rhyme with *boss*”?
Wouldn’t a purely rule-based phonetic expectation for a word
spelled *lose* to rhyme with *dose*?
I expected it to look something like this:
clarification: by “should be pronounced loss” do you mean “should rhyme with dose” or “should rhyme with boss”? Wouldn’t a purely rule-based phonetic expectation for a word spelled lose to rhyme with dose?
Unfortunately it comes out looking like this:
clarification: by “should be pronounced loss*” do you mean “should rhyme with *dose*” or “should rhyme with *boss*”? Wouldn’t a purely rule-based phonetic expectation for a word spelled *lose to rhyme with dose?
Which is just awesomely terrible, embarrassingly bad. It makes me, as the commenter, look foolish. Seeing as how using HTML as a workaround is not possible in comments, is there any workaround so that my comments can be formatted correctly? Or is it really a “design choice” that you can only italicize some parts of comments but not others?
Update: I get the same issue if I used the “official” underscore syntax for italics in comment markup:
clarification: by “should be pronounced _loss_” do you mean
“should rhyme with _dose_” or “should rhyme with _boss_”?
Wouldn’t a purely rule-based phonetic expectation for a word
spelled _lose_ to rhyme with _dose_?
resulting in this:
clarification: by “should be pronounced loss_” do you mean “should rhyme with _dose_” or “should rhyme with _boss_”? Wouldn’t a purely rule-based phonetic expectation for a word spelled _lose to rhyme with dose?
status-bydesign
on 22 July, indicating that this is how the comment Markdown is designed to work. That seems utterly ludicrous to me. I run afoul of this arbitrary and extremely annoying bug in nearly half the comments I make. Why on earth would anyone expect the Markdown to choke on typographically correct quotes, but do fine with incorrect quotes? – Janus Bahs Jacquet Aug 25 '13 at 18:21