Erik Naggum:
SGML has already caught on. It isn't entrenched in the market, yet, but
it's experiencing early exponential growth in both products and users.
(Unless you meant only Internet mail, in which case it's still a very open
question.)
Yes, I meant Internet mail. Sorry, I should have indicated that.
That is, certain text elements in a document may
provide that "*" shall be interpreted as "<bold>" (via one level of
indirection). Inside the bold element, the "*" is interpreted as
"</bold>", and you have exactly what you're suggesting.
Interesting. Thanks for the info. (In the meantime, however,
Nathaniel posted a message saying that richtext's SGML-like syntax
made people expect unreasonable things from richtext. That could well
be the case. We may need to take care not to make people expect
"strong" formatting from text/enhanced, or whatever it's called
today.)
Erik van der Poel