hls? Hmm, isn't that highlight searching? (i.e. highlight the thing you're looking for.) Sorry, maybe I wasn't as clear as I might have been.. :)

Actually, I just went through the help again, to see if I could work it out. Turns out the commands I needed were:

" To turn off highlighting of everything between any single quotes (e.g. isn'...t -> doesn...'t):
:hi link htmlString NONE
" To turn off big bright inverse colours for italicised text
:hi htmlItalics NONE

That's sorted me out.

(Some context: I'm using the Markdown highlighting file from the vim script archives, which links certain strings to html highlighting. I've added the two commands above (without colons) to the syntax/mkd.vim file.

In fact, can anyone explain what this means?:

syn region htmlString start="("ms=e+1 end=")"me=s-1

I know it sets up a syntax region, but what's the start and end values?
)