The title was probably not very clear. Consider this scnerio: you have a blog site or really just any site where a user can respond via a comment. You want to maintain the formatting for the comments. So paragraph's should be separated, first sentence indented, bolding of keywords allowed, etc. How would one go about doing this?

This is something just about every kind of blogging site handles, including this site. My initial guess is that comments are saved to that database either in an xml format or as the raw html. Those are really my only guesses. I suppose magic strings could be used to denote the starting and ending of various formatting as well, but magic strings are generally frowned upon.

I'm doing this in an asp.net mvc application. I'm using version 1 of mvc, but I would be willing to move to 2 if that makes for an easy solution here.