why would you want to "throw away" the author's intent?
I don't want to throw away author's intent. But the reality is, in many cases DP and PG do so. Leading and following underscores are not plain text. It is an encoding to signal to the reader that something is missing -- namely italics. One could have just as well -- or as badly -- used <i> and </i> as the signals to indicate to the reader that italics is missing. I don't doubt that eventually the reader can get used to what they're missing -- but why should they have to? If it were really that hard to much more closely follow author's intent then I could understand the trade-offs. But with today's technology it really wouldn't be hard to do much better. And again, if you *want* plain text then it's easy enough to go backwards and throw away the italic information, etc.