You don't need all of html. I get by with about half a dozen tags.

<i>text</i> italics

<b>text</b> bold

<a href="url">text</a>

<blockquote>text</blockquote> blockquote helpfully adds blank lines before and after the quoted block, so that it's harder to read your html because you have to leave the blank lines out

<strike>text</strike> puts a line through your text-- I don't use istrike much, but it's handy for being a wiseass