The dilemma is this:

When I enter a new title that uses italics, like "<i>!WarioWare, Inc.</i>: The greatest game ever made", two things happen (apart of the fact that they show up on the article page and just about everywhere on the world, etc):

• Permalink looks really ugly by default: i-warioware-inc-i-the-greatest... or something like that.
• The <i> tags get copied to the HTML <title>, and not even in escaped form. As everyone knows, this sort of gimmics do not work in page titles, and look bloody ugly and, I think, don't even validate.
• They're also present in RSS feed as escaped HTML, I'm not sure if RSS spec allows this at all and whether or not they show as intended in any clients at all (though you can never be sure about how RSS works in general, who am I to call this behavior unpredictable?)

I think the tags should just disappear in places where they can't possibly work. But they should work in places where they do work, like in the page content and article lists.