Yeah! Then italics could be <i>foo</i>, etc. We could then give this variation a cool name, like "hypertext markup language".
Implementation details still have to be implemented. Someone else might come along and figure that different documents may want to interpret "emphasis" differently, and while we're at it, why not make it composable? They may design a DSL for that, and give it a cool name too, like "cascading style sheets".