I like this suggestion, @codinghorror’s call on the wording here. I agree calling italics emphasised in the tooltip is somewhat confusing. Looking at Stack Exchange sites it uses “Emphasis” and “Strong” so there is precedent even in non tech sites. GitHub uses “Bold” and “Italic”.
Regarding making Italics/Bold smarter. There are quite a few edge cases… for example, when you highlight this block and hit “B” what do you expect?
- test
- text
-test
(3) test
4. test
[spoiler]
test
[/spoiler]
test [i]test
test[/i]
The ideal outcome has a LOT of magic rules, and we don’t want to have to write a full parser here.
I see (1) highlighting text, then hitting “B” as different from (2) not having text and hitting “B”. The first case does have a lot of magic rules. Perhaps until there’s rich text editing (if that’s at all a priority), include a button that links to Markdown syntax? An you know, I think the second case already works very well for “B” and should be replicated for lists and blockquotes.