No. Imagine the semantic content differences of:
- He had three pieces of pie.
- He had three pieces of pie.
- He had three pieces of pie.
- He had three pieces of pie.
- He had three pieces of pie.
And now remove the bolding. You can't distinguish those. The semantic content is in the bolding. If you had only ASCII, you might add *markup* or _something_ to provide the right emphasis. But if you just rip out the HTML coding, you have indeed
lost something.
This is quite common. I don't know why you think it's rare. :)
-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.
