Formatting buttons - broken?

The formatting buttons do not seem to function as I would expect. When you click the italic button, for instance, it inserts only the opening tag. If I type a word then manually type the closing italic tag, everything seems fine. But when you submit your response, the parser slaps a closing italic tag at the very end of your post, and because this closing tag is no longer paired (since I already included one manually), it gets included in the post.

I'm not sure how it's supposed to function, but I can say that to me it is not intuitive. I would expect the button to insert both opening and closing tags, and place the cursor in between. If a word or phrase is already highlighted, the button should encapsulate the highlighted text in a pair of tags. This goes for all formatting buttons.

Because of this, I have resorted to manually typing all formatting tags, which I am personally okay with, but one should not need to do this. Just a suggestion.

Thanks for reading.