I think it's a good idea because people frequently wish to add emphasis or distinguish book, film or other titles from the main body of the text. The result is lots of pointy brackets everywhere. I dislike this, it makes the index page look untidy.
I think maybe in abstracts and stuff that would be good, but the titles end up in the top of the page and you can't have code in those bits and I don't want to figure out how to do that bit. I might look into this.
I can't remember why this was taken out, now that I come to think about it. Wasn't it something to do with broken HTML in abstracts fucking up the entire index page, or was it just to prevent people from posting links and images in teh abstract field?
I think people were using weird graphics in the abstracts, smilies possibly but I can't double-check because I really don't remember when it was disabled.
