Easy access to fancy formatting would make posts worse, not better. Just look at any of those forums with buttons and see what bloating forum signatures people add to their posts.

Mosts posts don't need need more formatting than paragraphs and code tags. Italics can sometimes help if used very rarely and as skillfully as Arany János did in his poems. You do sometimes need other formatting, and some ideas are even best to be shown by a table or drawing, but it would be foolish to advertise such features or they'll be abused.

In reply to Re^2: Wiki-Style syntax for posting by ambrus
in thread Wiki-Style syntax for posting by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
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  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.