Sandman
"The boldfaced words were originally typed inside asterisks, to indicate emphasis in text that sticks to ASCII characters"

You don't have to use caps or asterisks, but using quotation marks is non-standard and mocked as only being used by illiterate people, so having the suggestion come from you is endlessly funny.

Eric Stevens
Actually, as you will know, the use of single emphatic quotation marks is standard, as are *asterisks* and _underlining_, although underlining is less common in recent years.