Steve, I'm glad you said that you want to put 'bits' of your posts in italics. Sometimes people put long sections in italics, and I find them very hard to read.

In fact, I've decided that I won't read anything in italics if it has more than two lines of text. I feel that if something's important , it ought to be legible.

(I see that the / is right next to the <>. Handy!)