I saw no reason to do so.
In reality, all that stuff you wrote about italics was WHY I chose not to, because back in the day we had tons of problems with italics and we used to say: Close your Italians!
I knew it was a matter of coding and some software dude getting around to doing it.
Eventually, someone will tell me that I should have learned how to do colored text as well. I'll have to wait for the update.
To turn it off, just add a backslash / after the first bracket, but before or to the left of where one will next put, without skipping a space, the letter i, followed by the right pointing (or East pointing? if top of keyboard be North) bracket. All consecutive, no skipped spaces. Try it some day, then preview before hitting "post" a second time.
If things don't look right, one can continue to use the preview key, until it looks the way you would like it to.
The "backslash" / key, is the question mark key on keyboard, but without using shift key, or shifting to CAPS-lock. FR is a great place to practice basic formatting.
The preview button allows one to inspect, then make changes. It's almost a perfect learning tool, for that reason.
Colored text is simple too. The command bracket. The one pointing West, shall we say.
Type it. Then type, without using quotation marks themselves (which I will here, just for isolating of what needs be entered) "font color=red" followed immediately (without skipping a space, you know, without hitting the spacebar(?)) by the East pointing bracket ">". Again, without any quotation marks.
To turn off the color, inside or nestled within the West-East brackets < > type first the backslash symbol / followed by the word font. That's basically enough to turn off any preceding font command.
Now may not be the time...but this is as good a place as you otherwise may find... .
Otherwise, coders in the past have had problems with needing to have an active web page somewhere (even if closed to the public for the time being, or just the "back-end" of a web site which had a feature which allowed a test display of changes) which was a hurdle coders of 20 years ago would come across.
The preview function of the combox (as these sort of 'windows' we type into are called elsewhere on the web) here at FR makes it a perfect place to practice.
It's like learning how to ride a bicycle? Except there isn't risk and damage if one falls over. Then, a little bit of html usage can help one search for other coding "tricks" online.