Italics get used to express important semantic meaning, so unicode should support them

[abrahamgross at disroot.org]

Its also possible to come up with a system to use double letters or lets say exclamation point+letter instead of any uppercase letters. I can write !belgium or bbelgium instead of Belgium and get ppl to agree to do it and then I wouldn't neet italics.
The only reason why things like _italics_ or *italics* are around is because of the lack of real italics. I would go as far as to say that the very existence of *italics* in plain text shows that theres a real need for italics when writing plain text.
This is a workaround around a real problem of the lack of italics if I've ever seen one…

Dec 21, 2020 6:22:26 AM Dominikus Dittes Scherkl via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org>:

> Prosody is a wholly different thing, as others already mentioned.
> But in fact, you DID preserve it - in plain text - by adding an
> underscore before and after the word with emphasis. You could also have
> used ' or " or even * for the same effect, but nevertheless it is
> already possible to preserve the special intent of the author _without_
> any further additions.
>