Is there left any way to highlight part of text after all?

Question

Currently we have quotes, but

the quoted text looks more faint than the surrounding text

The vertical bar hardly helps, I believe. In fact I think (although I cannot explain it) that this bar somehow makes things even worse.

OK I realize that all this is my subjective impression, but I can imagine that many users would agree with it.

One can make the quoted text bold,

but this somehow cries out too much, at the same time still remaining too faint by some reason.

What else? There is code,

but again this is something still different, right?

Is there any rationale behind this particular style of quoting?

Slightly later:

One more possibility occurred to me: one might abuse MathJax with $\color{red}{\textsf{some $\rm\TeX$ hacks}}$, including $\require{color}\colorbox{pink}{background highlighting}$ (done, respectively, like this $\color{red}{\textsf{some $\rm\TeX$ hacks}}$ and this $\require{color}\colorbox{pink}{background highlighting}$), but I'm afraid this solution might be objectionable. What do you think?

Answer 1

Section headers.

Or smaller section headers

Or even smaller section headers

And, please, for the love of Erdős, do not use those other hacks. They are wrong semantical markup, and I find them all very objectionable. For instance, I have found myself searching for the source of a "quote" in the past, thinking that they were quoting something that someone wrote earlier in another answer.

(Also, you are not writing an ad. Excessive highlighting should be avoided, in my view.)

Answer 2

I personally liked to use quoting for highlighting a question in a long body of text,

but now the style has changed, and I am also persuaded by the semantic markup issue.

But this answer is mostly to demonstrate that code style is much more terrible, since long lines don't wrap, and one gets a scroll bar, and on mobile I think this is much worse than any problem with quoting for emphasis.

What would be nice is to be able to highlight some text background, like the old quote style used to do.

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Also, would it be to use horizontal lines like this to delineate a question?

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This way one would at least focus some attention. But I worry that again it's a (slightly lesser) abuse of the semantic content of the markdown. Also, one needs a blank line before the second line command (----) else it turns the question into a heading.

• Another alternative is to make a single bullet list item!

Added:

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Question 1:

Does a vertically-delineated section with a question header like this one help with your problem?

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It's always possible to have a bit more text afterwards. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

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Question 2:

And would you like a second question?

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Followed by some closing remarks. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.