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Always wondering if there's a standard format for the thing in emails that uses underscore, slashes, asterisks for underline, italics, bold and less/greater than for URLs. Never found it. Always thought it would be a great addition to pandoc output formats :)

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Markdown but with <> for URLs instead of []? It does seem like Markdown borrowed some of these ad hoc conventions for its syntax.

Technically, formatting rules like these can be described using SGML short references, which then serve to replace those tokens by start- and end-element tags into angle-bracket markup (SGML, XML, HTML). Works for block quotes, too, as tokens scanned for replacement can be anchored at line beginnings (can include "record start" and "record end" characters).

Though I'm not aware of a modern MUA employing SGML ;(

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