There's a very small set of text decorations which would suit virtually all cases.
And there was a long history (about 100 years) of monospaced, mono-sized, typographic conventions based on typewriters and cheap reproduction (carbon paper, spirit duplicators, xerography), before the desktop-publishing era brought us out of that in the 1980s. The problem with formatting is that, like Johnny Rocco in Key Largo, someone always wants more, and not for your benefit but theirs.[1]
In the Web world, counter to an argument elsewhere in this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27113404), my experience is that Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem. Straight ASCII text (via w3m or other text-mode browsers), or Reader Mode (where supported) is vastly preferable to many, many nines worth of sites' prescribed designs.
One thought I've had is that user agents could provide, at user discretion, additional typographic control to sites. But for the basics you're limited to 7-bit (not 8) ASCII. Everything else is earned, and you'd best degrade very gracefully.
I've seen websites written where every individual paragraph has an explicitly-specified location. I've seen blogs written entirely in header-level tags. I've seen writers who add nonbreaking whitespace to the start of every paragraph. I've seen blink, marquee, and carousel abuse. I've seen foreground and background colours you wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion....
I would be fine if my client would neatly format a limited markdown format and other clients supported entering it in a WYSIWYG fashion, as long as all the displayed content is part of the transmitted message (no further connection to the net) and the client is guaranteed not to execute any sender-supplied code or transmit any data when links or images are displayed.
Just a heads up that screen readers will tend to read sentences like that as "I think you meant MATHEMATICAL BOLD SMALL B MATHEMATICAL BOLD SMALL O MATHEMATICAL BOLD SMALL L MATHEMATICAL BOLD SMALL D comma MATHEMATICAL ITALIC SMALL I MATHEMATICAL ITALIC SMALL T MATHEMATICAL ITALIC SMALL A MATHEMATICAL ITALIC SMALL L MATHEMATICAL ITALIC SMALL I MATHEMATICAL ITALIC SMALL C and U N D E R L I N E" and so on which can be extremely unpleasant
I don't get why you're being downvoted. Every time Unicode support or rich text formatting comes up on HN someone wants to show off how "smart" they are.
I got an almost identical comment when I said HN doesn't support any formatting, except for italic and link formatting.
Inputting by hand (or maybe with a script - who cares anyway?) random Unicode characters to show that rich text is actually possible is the opposite of "smart" in a discussion between reasonable adults.
I did it by hand. There are websites to do this, but I’m not interested in doing this for any regular purpose, so I don’t think I have them saved. Besides, it’s more interesting to do it manually; you learn things about how Unicode works if you involve yourself in the low-level details once in a while.
> the opposite of "smart" in a discussion between reasonable adults.
I don't think you need to be so negative about this.
Most people are unaware that Unicode has that kind of character and even fewer people know what it does to screen readers.
The difference between showing off knowledge and trying to be show people a cool thing you know about is intent and it's REALLY hard to get that across on the internet.
