Encoding italic

[James Kass via Unicode]

Nobody has really addressed Andrew West's suggestion about using the tag 
characters.

It seems conformant, unobtrusive, requiring no official sanction, and 
could be supported by third-partiers in the absence of corporate 
interest if deemed desirable.

One argument against it might be:  Whoa, that's just HTML.  Why not just 
use HTML?  SMH

One argument for it might be:  Whoa, that's just HTML!  Most everybody 
already knows about HTML, so a simple subset of HTML would be recognizable.

After revisiting the concept, it does seem elegant and workable. It 
would provide support for elements of writing in plain-text for anyone 
desiring it, enabling essential (or frivolous) preservation of 
editorial/authorial intentions in plain-text.

Am I missing something?  (Please be kind if replying.)

On 2019-01-20 10:35 AM, Andrew West wrote:

> A possibility that I don't think has been mentioned so far would be to
> use the existing tag characters (E0020..E007F). These are no longer
> deprecated, and as they are used in emoji flag tag sequences, software
> already needs to support them, and they should just be ignored by
> software that does not support them. The advantages are that no new
> characters need to be encoded, and they are flexible so that tag
> sequences for start/end of italic, bold, fraktur, double-struck,
> script, sans-serif styles could be defined. For example start and end
> of italic styling could be defined as the tag sequences <i> and </i>
> (E003C E0069 E003E and E003C E002F E0069 E003E).
>
> Andrew