Inline

In spoken communication, we use variations in our tone, loudness and speed, to express our feelings and give emphasis and special meaning to certain words or phrases. In the (less expressive) written communication, we use type variations, special formatting and - in some cases - small images called emoticons or smileys.

ZML has a series of - as they called - inline tags used for formatting words and phrases. In fact, you can format any arbitrary selection of characters. It doesn't need to start and stop on word boundaries. There is a restriction, however: the selection to be formatted must not cross a paragraph boundary, which is an empty line. In other words, you cannot apply inline (character) text formatting on a selection that spans two or more paragraphs. If you do and it passes the ZML parser, your HTML output will be malformed and invalid!

It is worth mentioning that the Unicode character set includes a lot of symbols and graphics you can use, without resorting to images. You can get an idea from here.