Subject: Re: Normal Clean style
From: John L. Clark (jlc6@po.cwru.edu)
Date: Thu Aug 02 2001 - 13:08:06 CDT
On Thu, Aug 02, 2001 at 03:24:13PM -0000, David Chart wrote:
> Looking at the style definition in exported XHTML, the purpose of the
> Normal Clean style appears to be to ensure that everything gets set back to
> the default after a Heading or similar. Is that right?
>
> This means that most paragraphs in my documents are now Normal Clean, not
> just Normal, and this has broken the nice XHTML export. Because the
> exporter doesn't know that Normal Clean is exactly the same as Normal, it
> is exporting redundant style information to every paragraph.
>
> Is there any way to roll all of the Normal Clean properties into Normal?
> Or, alternatively, set the next style from Normal Clean to be Normal? Then
> there would only be a few such paragraphs, and that's less of a problem.
This brings up a general issue that I've had with our styles list ever
since we started getting styles like Normal Clean and Numbered Headings.
First of all, I think that the addition of so many styles which actually
provide structural, not markup, information, without characterizing
those styles at all, is a pollution of the Styles pool/namespace. For
example, I don't understand why the Normal Clean style should be
necessary.
Having worked with styles before, and even within our codebase, I get
bewildered when I see our unorganized, ungainly long list of styles to
choose from. That it should even come to the point where I have to
manually sort through styles by name in the XHTML exporter is indicative
of a problem.
A style should be a grouping of certain formatting characteristics which
provide information about how the structure of a document is presented.
Arguments can be made on both sides of the fence that lists do or do not
fall under this characteristic. Assuming, for the moment, that they do
(which is only /mostly/ consistent with the way Abi does it currently),
list formatting information should be separated from issues such as
boldness, font, etc (which are part of the numbered heading styles).
I believe the solution is to organize our styles better, which should be
fairly straightforward to do within the PD_Style class, and to rethink
how we go about mixing and matching our styles. For example, I feel
that a numbered heading should be a list with a heading style applied to
it.
Take care,
John
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