Markup in translatable strings?

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Saluton Benno,

We were having an argument on how best to represent bullet lists and
such in Guix package descriptions, which are translatable strings.  That
led us to wonder whether we should simply use a subset of Texinfo or
HTML/XML to do that:

  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2015-07/msg00471.html

In practice, I imagine we would use at just a few markups, like @code,
@itemize and @item, @dfn, @example, and @url.

WDYT?  Is markup acceptable in translatable strings?

If it is, our preference would be Texinfo, because that’s what is used
throughout GNU and Guix; it’s also lightweight (newlines implicitly
introduce a new paragraph, and one doesn’t usually have to “close tags”
as in XML.)  However, if you think HTML or XML would be more appropriate
for translators, that’s an option we could consider.

Thanks,
Ludo’.