Rule - MD036

Property	Value
Aliases	md036, no-emphasis-as-heading, no-emphasis-as-header
Autofix Available	No
Enabled By Default	Yes

Summary

Emphasis possibly used instead of a heading element.

Reasoning

To people that are new to Markdown, they may retain an old habit of using various forms of Markdown emphasis to create a heading, instead of using Markdown's Atx Heading element or SetExt Heading element. The heading elements are present to allow a higher semantic meaning to be associated with the text, rather than the more simplistic emphasis meaning associated with text that is emphasized.

Examples

Failure Scenarios

This rule triggers when a single line of text is present in a Paragraph element, the entirety of the text is within an Emphasis element, and that text does not end with any of the configured punctuation characters.

```Markdown My document

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...

Another section

Consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod. ```

Correct Scenarios

This rule does not trigger when all constraints have not been met:

```Markdown My document

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...

Almost a section heading

Consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod.

But this is not a heading!

Consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod. ```

Fix Description

The reason for not being able to auto-fix this rule is certainty. The summary for this rule specifically states:

Emphasis possibly used instead of a heading element.

As this rule simply advises that it found cases that only appear to be headings that are created with emphasis, it does not attempt to fix them.

Configuration

Prefixes
plugins.md036.
plugins.no-emphasis-as-heading.
plugins.no-emphasis-as-header.

Value Name	Type	Default	Description
enabled	boolean	True	Whether the Rule Plugin is enabled.
punctuation	string	.,;:!?。，；：？	Punctuation characters that are considered sentence ending characters.

Origination of Rule

This rule is largely inspired by the MarkdownLint rule MD036. and this article.

Differences From MarkdownLint Rule

The original rule did not work inside of Block Quote elements or List elements.