Encoding italic

[James Kass via Unicode]

Doug Ewell wrote,

 > I can't speak for Andrew, but I strongly suspect he implemented this as
 > a proof of concept, not to declare himself the Maker of Standards.

BabelPad also offers plain-text styling via math-alpha conversion, 
although this feature isn’t newly added.  Users interested in seeing how 
plain-text italics might work can try out the stateful approach using 
tags contrasted with the character-by-character approach using 
math-range italic letters.  (Of course, the math-range stuff is already 
being interchanged on the WWW, whilst the tagging method does not yet 
appear to be widely supported.)

A few miles upthread, ‘where are the third-party developers’ was asked.  
‘Everywhere’ is the answer.  Since third-party developers have to 
subsist on the crumbs dropped by the large corps, they tend to be 
responsive to user needs and requests.