Here's a small suggestion (sorry if it was already suggested), why not use shortcuts for things such as bold, so when you do ctrl B, it'll bold stuff, and when you click ctrl B again it'll unbold everything. Same with ctrl Q and ctrl I.

I also suggest highlighting all the above tabs (such as quote, bold, and italics) when being used or that it goes into a different colour. So for example if I start to start using bold right now the above bold tab that makes stuff bold would be highlighted or turned it a different colour for the duration of people using it.

Just a thought.

The only problem with hotkeys for markup is that some browsers already have stuff assigned for hotkeys - for example, on Opera, ctrl + b opens the bookmark tab. Cool idea, though.

Second suggestion: wut? Do you mean markup while the person is still writing a post? You might as well make real-time text editing so that the bold text is bolded and the italics are italicized, etc.

And the fact that the buton changes from Bold into /Bold when clicking the first time is already a reference as to where you are during the editing of written text for a post.
Maybe making the button turn into a negative image of the original one when clicking it the first time could be an option though, but as it's mere cosmetic stuff, it's probably (if noticed) all the way on the bottom of the task list for the admins VonHeisenbourg...

I live to be on the bottom of a task list :D

Anyways what you say may be true, but you still notice some people inaccurately or misquoting. I suggested highlighting it so as to reduce these mistakes. Just a thought though :D

The only problem with hotkeys for markup is that some browsers already have stuff assigned for hotkeys - for example, on Opera, ctrl + b opens the bookmark tab. Cool idea, though.

I guess the only logical thing left to do is get a hacker to hack the browser and take it down for the mere purposes of convenience that would take about half a second to do otherwise.