I should probably have sent my reply in an HTML email so my message would be unambiguous. Let me try again.

At the dawn of Project Gutenberg, during a period lost to the mists of time, if someone encountered "The italic word" in a book, they would have typed "The ITALIC word" into the digital version. Eventually it became obvious that this was a bad way to mark up italics because under that scheme there was no unambiguous way to mark up "The italic CAPITAL word". Unambiguous encoding is a goal of many of the people here, so this was resolved by moving to other forms of markup, including using underscores to represent italics.

On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 6:12 PM, Keith J. Schultz <schultzk@uni-trier.de> wrote:
> Sparr,
>
> ALLOW, me to explain THAT Upper Case can be used for
> emphasis, yet it requires no mark up! YET, emphasis need not always have
> to be mark up as italic. _Also, the use of underscore can be used for other stylistic
> means. _Yet, semantics and style vary from author to author.
>
> regards
> Keith.
>
> P.S. nothing italic in the above!! ;-)))
>
> Am 12.10.2011 um 23:39 schrieb Sparr:
>
>> They don't require markup. But if they exist, then you can't use
>> uppercase AS markup.
>>
>> That is, you can take "The _italic_ word" and mark it up as ""The
>> ITALIC word"", as was the very original tradition, but that fails when
>> you try to mark up "The _italic_ CAPITAL word".
>>
>> On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 3:29 AM, Keith J. Schultz <schultzk@uni-trier.de> wrote:
>>> Excuse Me, but are UPPER CASE letters actually formatting that
>>> need be marked up.
>>>
>>>> On Tue, October 11, 2011 2:39 pm, James Adcock wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>> ...It quickly became apparent that at least
>>>>>> emphasis needed to be indicated and so it was decided that italicized text
>>>>>> would be indicated in UPPER CASE. Unfortunately, people began to discover
>>>>>> that
>>>>>> there were books which contained upper case text which was not intended as
>>>>>> emphasis...