Quarkdown author and project lead here. I started Quarkdown as a uni research project and couldn't imagine what it would end up being 2 years later. Thanks for engaging! I'll try and respond to your comments.
Quarkdown author and project lead here. I started Quarkdown as a uni research project and couldn't imagine what it would end up being 2 years later. Thanks for engaging! I'll try and respond to your comments.
Would you consider "fixing" the bold syntax on v3?
I have always believed that instead of **bold** and *italic*, it should be *bold* and _italic_.
That extra asterisk is a poor design decision in markdown. It really makes it inconvenient to edit Markdown on a phone or tablet.
It always bugs me that _underscore_ is the syntax for italics rather than underline.
I’m sure back in the old days of READMEs, long before markdown was a thing, the conventions were this:
RFC 1855, Netiquette Guidelines[1], specifies underscore for underlining. However, it says asterisks are for emphasis, not bold, per se. They just happened to (often?) display as bold because italics in terminals weren't a common thing. For the same reason, using /'s for italics didn't make much sense except maybe in word processors. I also suspect underscore become conflated with asterisk because some people preferred using the former for emphasis--people weren't usually trying to adhere to professional styling guides, and some people may have preferred underlining to impart emphasis, or just got into the habit without thinking about it.
I don't know how well RFC 1855 reflected common practice, though. It might be worthwhile to check the rendering code in clients like tin and mutt.
[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1855
Since this seems to boil down to personal choice, has anyone considered a customisable alternative? Like a frontmatter that declares which character is bold, which is italic. You could easily convert between them according to local preference, much like tabs/spaces.
My /usr/bin/ folder wants to know which bit gets italicised :)
I know this is a throwaway joke, but I was interested anyway...
According to my own local Markdown formatters, the answer would be both "usr" and "bin", with the surrounding slashes removed, but the internal slash remaining. In other words:
usr/bin
(but underlined instead of italic!)
Of course, this problem is nothing new since a filename might easily be named `_my_file_`.
Same as in my_snake_case_name :)
Org mode uses / as well.
Not planned, CommonMark compliance is a strong trait of Quarkdown's identity
It strikes me as odd to add functions to a text format, given that even in GUI documents macros are usually avoided. Was Quarkdown designed for complex and repetitive documents?
Thank you for volunteering to field questions.
Quarkdown was designed for control. Simple Markdown to define content, functions (LaTeX-style, but not macros!) for a declarative approach to document format and styling.
Scripting came out naturally, so why not. Since v2 QD comes with a permission system that makes things safer.
Is it like CSS for HTML?
> why not?
I wonder.
> Since v2 QD comes with a permission system that makes things safer.
That’s why not.
You got your JavaScript in my HTML.
Seriously though… it might be a useful feature. Or it could kill your product’s focus. Sincerely, good luck.
I read https://iamgio.eu/2025-12-10-accidentally-in-silicon-valley/ and it appears it worked out well – I'm happy for you!
Thank you! This project is giving me so much fulfillment