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Comment by kbd | Hacker News Reader

Here's hoping they can finally work natural _underline_ support in...

Edit: I've wondered whether the original Markdown didn't have underline support because was deprecated/removed from HTML. FWIW, is now back in HTML5.

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Underlines traditionally have semantically meant the same as italics. When an editor wanted the printer to make a certain word italic, he would underline it in the draft.

Really, underlines are a useless decoration. That's why HTML took them out. Not sure why they put them back in...

Like you said, they are a decoration. When handwriting something, some people use underlines for different kinds of emphasis. Those people want to make text look a certain way. It's good that HTML5 brought back underlines, just in case someone wants to use them, they at least have the option.

The primary reason is to provide for Chinese proper name marks (where underlining has a semantic meaning) and occasionally for misspellings (in English, we'd probably add the editorial text [sic]). As a decoration, it is useless, but there are circumstances where it has semantic meaning. (The and tags were promoted back to respectability for the same reasons, since using for text that is not stressed or for text that would traditionally be bolded without implying extra importance is just as semantically incorrect as using and for stress and importance would be. Arbitrary spans don't imply any semantic meaning. Where I would have used previously, I'd now use . The tag marks the text as special rather than just arbitrarily styled.)

> The primary reason is to provide for Chinese proper name marks

That's an improper use, you want {COMBINING LOW LINE} U+0332 for that.

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