[DanBC]

> But it wouldn't handle indentation properly

8 spaces is fine.

> For example, you need to handle bullet points.

Asterisks are fine.

> Also, all viewers would have to support it, which somewhat defeats the purpose of using plain text.

I think that you're over thinking what plain text is. I don't mean "plain text with some additions". I really do just mean plain text.

[agargarg]

> 8 spaces is fine.

I'm not talking tab characters, I'm talking indentation of whole paragraphs with plain spaces, as seen in the article. Most existing viewers just wrap long lines so that the wrapped content is unindented: this makes any indentation hard to notice and mostly useless. For your proposition to be viable, viewing software has to detect indentation and keep that indentation in wrapped lines.

> Asterisks are fine.

Ok, but usually you want to indent the wrapped contents by 2 columns otherwise asterisks become hard to notice. This is only possible with special magic in the viewer.

[agargarg]

  --- BEGIN MESSAGE ---
  --- BEGIN BLOCK QUOTE ---
  --- BEGIN BLOCK QUOTE ---
  I'm not talking tab characters, I'm talking indentation of whole paragraphs
  with plain spaces, as seen in the article.
  --- END BLOCK QUOTE ---
  Ah, okay. You're right, indenting an entire paragraph is hard.
  --- BEGIN BLOCK QUOTE ---
  This is the kind of thing they'd do on Usenet.
  --- END BLOCK QUOTE ---
  --- END BLOCK QUOTE ---
  All you get is a very verbose markup language :-)
  --- END MESSAGE ---

[DanBC]

> I'm not talking tab characters, I'm talking indentation of whole paragraphs with plain spaces, as seen in the article.

Ah, okay. You're right, indenting an entire paragraph is hard.

--- BEGIN BLOCK QUOTE ---

This is the kind of thing they'd do on Usenet.

---END BLOCK QUOTE ---

[angersock]

Sometimes there is no replacement for just a big honking array of ASCII.