[OneWingedShark]

What I meant to say was that even basic HTML markup improves the readability of text.

The markup [proper] certainly hinders readibilty, only the rendering of the formatting is what aids readability.

E.g., in your #11, you used <ol>, <tt>, <i>, <sup>. These and other simple elements of HTML markup made your post easier to read than it would have been, had you been restricted to writing pure tty-compatible ASCII.

Granted, though there's a surprising amount that you can do without markup:

	As an example, I am using Notepad to make a chunk of 'formatted' plain-text -- as you can see,
tabs can perform indenting which is still something that HTML lacks. As for ordered-lists, the following
is common enough:
		1) Element one.
		2) Element two.
		3) Element three.
		x) Element X.
	In addition to that we can do the same with unorderd lists using '-', '+', '*', '•', '—', 'º',
or '›'.

[cynwoody]

        It's more than a bit of a cluge, but you can indent paragraphs using only HTML. E.g., you can use a string of &nbsp; entities at the beginning of each paragraph. However, to indent paragraphs cleanly, you need CSS text-indent. CSS lets you do hanging indents as well. But FR strips out CSS, alas.