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.
