The author believes that plain text should encode bold, italic, etc., because that's all they had exposure to. Were the text written today, they would claim emojis belong in unicode as well.
Most social media don't support it, but on Tumblr, for example, you can specify the color of the text and even choose a different font. I think there was some other social media that allowed you to have animated effects on the text as well, but I forgot the name.
Which adds complexity and solves nothing. We'd better have a standard markup (we already have) than this half-assed wannabe-markup that is so complex and a minefield that modern forums tend to filter it anyway. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_super... – The wikipedia article about unicode sub/superscripts can't even render half of these symbols on neither of my {ios,windows,android} devices. In theory we have it, in practice it's dead baggage.
The author believes that plain text should encode bold, italic, etc., because that's all they had exposure to. Were the text written today, they would claim emojis belong in unicode as well.
Most social media don't support it, but on Tumblr, for example, you can specify the color of the text and even choose a different font. I think there was some other social media that allowed you to have animated effects on the text as well, but I forgot the name.