Re: XML and Styles: Best location for attributes?


Subject: Re: XML and Styles: Best location for attributes?
From: Alan Horkan (horkana@tcd.ie)
Date: Sat Sep 22 2001 - 13:07:40 CDT


Randy Kramer wrote:

>>Am I missing something in thinking that most of the attributes for a
>>style should be in the <style> tags and not repeated in each paragraph?
>>If not, I will begin submitting some bugs or rfe's on that basis.
>>
I would like to thank Randy for eloquently and succinctly saying what i
couldnt quite pin down.

In some part i beleive the developers have tried very hard to make
Abiword WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) where as HTML and XML by
extension (no pun intended) are primarily intended to handle content.

 From what i know of XML i would think that the XML could be tightened
up without having to break WYSIWIG.
The Abiword web page for example specifies at the start what font and
style tags such as <h1> & <p> should use and leaves it at that.
I like to keep it simple, if you wrote your html by hand you would
probably keep it spartan too. Personally like to have HTML with little
or no Style sheets (simply because i dont understand stylesheets) and
better abstraction would allow me to have it my way (with a quick hack
and slash here and there) without bothered anyone else. While the HTML
abiword produces is quite readable, specifying "Times New Roman" on
every line on a document is overkill when you want the HTML equivalent
of plaintext. WYSIWIG is useful but sometimes What You See Is What You
Mean is a more appropriate paradigm, but im not give up Abiword in
favour of Lyx just yet.

 From my understanding of the general methodology of Styles this kind of
abstraction is all good.

So what (if anything) are Randy and i missing?

I would suspect that this is harder than it sounds, but at the very
least we can make a few tweaks here and there.

Mise le meas
Alan



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