agargarg

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  I'm not talking tab characters, I'm talking indentation of whole paragraphs
  with plain spaces, as seen in the article.
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  Ah, okay. You're right, indenting an entire paragraph is hard.
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  This is the kind of thing they'd do on Usenet.
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  All you get is a very verbose markup language :-)
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I'm not talking tab characters, I'm talking indentation of whole paragraphs with plain spaces, as seen in the article. Most existing viewers just wrap long lines so that the wrapped content is unindented: this makes any indentation hard to notice and mostly useless. For your proposition to be viable, viewing software has to detect indentation and keep that indentation in wrapped lines.

> Asterisks are fine.

Ok, but usually you want to indent the wrapped contents by 2 columns otherwise asterisks become hard to notice. This is only possible with special magic in the viewer.

That's interesting: I saw the plaintext version first, which I had no problem reading. But in the HTML version, the fact that all bold sentences are pretty mundane and the excessive use of italic and bold just made me want to skip the whole page. In fact I didn't even notice it was the same content until I went back to your post!

Also, all viewers would have to support it, which somewhat defeats the purpose of using plain text.