B/V alternation, technical difficulties (was Re: Asian Number Systems)

In a message dated 10/6/00 12:55:19 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
fortytwo@GDN.NET writes:

> AIUI, that's a pretty common alternation in Spanish.  There really
>  should be a reform to abolish <v>, and use  for all occurrences, or
>  vice versa, but  seems better than <v>, since <v> looks rather
>  similar to , especially in handwriting.  For Castilian Spanish, that
>  one change would make it completely consistent in both directions,
>  written -> spoken and spoken -> written.
>
ACK! for those of us whose mail programs read html, this causes a bit of
trouble:
"b" inside <these> turns on bold.
"u" inside <these> turns on underlined.
"i" would do the same for italic, and I think "s" for strikethrough.

And they delete themselves, as you can hopefully see above.
Please choose markers other than <these>, such as [these] or /these/, when
marking such things, so our computers don't cause trouble!