Pro: Viewing text with bold and italics is supported by anything that supports (up to date) Unicode. No other formatting needed. But really when was the last ti

Pro: Viewing text with bold and italics is supported by anything that supports (up to date) Unicode. No other formatting needed. But really when was the last time you looked at some text in a context that didn’t include some formatting? A text editor. That’s about it. An IDE. Con: Everything in the universe that can edit text now has to handle new ways to encode bold and italics and choose between the character encoding or the document encoding for saving it. How is that choice made? On the whole, seems like we should keep the character encoding in Unicode and the formatting in the enclosing document format. Besides, we’d need to add underline, strike through, etc.