> But even most adults won't know the rules for what to italicize that > have been brought up in this thread. Even if they have read books that > use italic and bold in ways that have been brought up in this thread, > most readers won't be able to tell you what the rules are. That's left > to copy editors and similar specialist jobs.
Most adults don't know the right places to soft-hyphenate a word, and yet we support that in plain-text. They also don't know the differences between the various dashes and spaces and when to use each. Literacy isn't an appropriate criteria. Even the apostrophe fails that test since so many people fail to distinguish its from it's and there from they're. :-) > There was a time when computers (and printers in particular) were > single-case. There was some discussion about having to abolish case > distinctions to adapt to computers, but fortunately, that wasn't necessary. Ironic to mention the example of the failure of technology to support linguistic requirements driving a proposal to limit the attributes of language. As you say it was fortunate it wasn't necessary then... It makes the case for the importance of improving technology to support fundamental language attributes. tex
