Re: Direct formatting STYLE attribute

On Thu, 7 Dec 1995, Scott E. Preece wrote:

> The
> places where anonymous styling makes sense are specifically where the
> intent of the styling is wholly local; I think the author's mental model
> is likely to NOT predict such uses until the text is actually being
> written; in fact, that might almost be a defining characteristic of
> appropriate uses...

I agree with the middle part of your sentence, that's why I suggested 
putting style declarations in the header *after* organizing the text 
conceptually (which would include writing the text with a named and 
hopefully meaningful, at least in a descriptive sense, style attribute). 
The best authors will tend to do that, and consider the effects of all of 
their style changes, instead of just writing down style attributes and 
text simultaneously.  Does CSS1 need to support poor practices?  

Also, how many people *really* use one-time styles very often?  I would 
suspect that a lot of those styles would appear only once per document 
but would reappear in subsequent documents, especially if the author is 
reasonably prolific.  In this case it would be much easier to reuse the 
style declarations later if they are collected in the heads rather than 
scattered randomly throughout documents.  Thus, forcing them to the heads 
might in the end promote more use of styling rather than less, even if 
some people don't like it in the short term.

David

Work: seibert@hep.physics.mcgill.ca         Home: 6420 36th Ave.
Physics Department, McGill University       Montreal, PQ, H1T 2Z5 
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Received on Thursday, 7 December 1995 16:49:45 UTC