One of the features I’m looking at is supporting some plain-text formatting to make it possible to add basic emphasis to post titles and comments without dicking around with HTML tags.

Unfortunately the perceived meaning of such shorthand doesn’t seem to be consistent, for example I commonly read *text like this* as italic, whereas google chat for instance would interpret it as bold. What google chat uses for italics is what I would commonly read as _underline_ for obvious reasons.

Anyway the three basic font styles I think are best represented as /italic/, _underline_ and *bold* so I’m experimenting with these in post titles here.