I think accessibility unlike uniformity or consistency for its own sake is one of the legitimate purposes of a directive Manual of Style see some of the long skirmishes just for the record that I and waged independently at Wikipedia talk Manual of Style and Wikipedia talk MOSNUM But to fit every conceivable device we d basically have to drop all formatting and just compose everything in Plaintext on Notepad For example and for the sake of example ignoring any aesthetic differences I certainly don t want my colo u rs to exclude black and white monitors or colo u r blind readers so I try to include some other indicator but if you drop all emphasis because it won t play everywhere there are very few options left Even daggers and asterisks don t show up very well everywhere because of clashing encoding conventions I suppose I could ignore grammar and mathematical logic by putting something like 1 1 and 3 3 1 but apart from weirdness they wouldn t distinguish themselves very well from 4 2