Plain text (from Re: Avoidance variants)

[William_J_G Overington]

> Blocks
    of boring plain text, no italics or effects any more complex than
    justification, simple notes written all in one font with no
    formatting to speak of etc.
I am wondering if it is considered a good idea to define into Plane 14 some formatting characters, so that plain text could in the future contain italics and so on.
For example, written here with an asterisk included as I seem to remember that that is the convention so as to avoid a suggested new character being mistaken as an existing character, how about the following.
*U+E1000 FORMAT NOT ITALICS
*U+E1001 FORMAT ITALICS
*U+E1002 FORMAT NOT BOLD
*U+E1003 FORMAT BOLD
Traditionally such a suggestion would be refuted as out of scope for plain text: use of markup would be suggested.
Yet that was then, this is now: ideas of what can, or should, be encoded in plain text have changed with time and could usefully continue to change where that is of use to consumers.
I have often wondered why use of markup is regarded as such a requirement when the capabilities of plain text could so easily be enhanced.  Expanding the capabilities of plain text would increase interoperability.
William Overington
26 March 2015
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