Subject: Re: on lists (was Re: commit: piecetable changes)
From: John L. Clark (jlc6@po.cwru.edu)
Date: Sat Nov 10 2001 - 14:44:07 CST
On Sat, Nov 10, 2001 at 08:31:15PM -0000, Tomas Frydrych wrote:
> Hi John,
>
> > Looking at the bug report, and the nature of this fix, does this remove
> > the need for the "Normal Clean" styles and that strategy of using
> > styles?
> Yes, it does.
Good. I thought it might. As below, you mention reducing the number of
styles, which I agree is overburdened for the functionality it provides.
Word provides a lot of styles, but they are actually a wide range of
structural types, which is appropriate. My only concern is that Martin
had a specific argument for why his "Normal Clean" hack was necessary,
and the details escape me at the moment.
> > One long standing question of mine was why list information should be
> > contained in a style at all. It seems to violate the standard
> > definition of a style, and I think it would make sense only as an
> > attribute of a paragraph,
>
> Well, at the moment it is not a part of the style, but it is an
> attribute of the paragraph. The problem here is that even though the
> list attributes are not part of a definition of the style, they are
> applied to a paragraph when a specialised style is used. Under
> these circumstances it is reasonable for the user to expect that
> applying non-list style will get rid off them. Either we should
> completely separate the lists from the styles, i.e., we would have
> no list-styles; or we need to tie the list stuff to the styles properly.
I would think no list-styles, in line with the discussion immediately
following.
> > or - and this may just be my html background
> > speaking - as a separate element structure altogether.
> I have no principal objection to that, and it would not be too difficult
> (in priniciple) to do, we would just need to create a new interface to
> apply the list formating. It would also substantially reduce the
> number of our built-in styles, which is already too large IMO.
I may look into this and see if I could provide the necessarily legwork.
I don't really like <p listid="foo">etc..</p> to represent a list item.
Just seems hackish to me, as does a lot of the structure surrounding
lists.
Take care,
John
P.S. Was there any reason for not sending out to the list, in
particular? Just curious, as I do want to hear everyone's thoughts on
the matter.
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