On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 2:05 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@xemacs.org>wrote:

But having an
> additional level of indirection (which is being called "style" in this
> thread) is going to be very useful in organizing these things.
>

Another form of indirection would be to allow abstract mark-up.  In the
context of today's face model it would be nice to be able to mark a span
with an abstract property or face (e.g. emphasis) without binding it
immediately to concrete face attributes.  Presumably there would be a
defined search through a document's structure and its associated styles for
mapping such abstract markup to concrete face attributes.

My hope would be that pasting into a separate document text with abstract
markup might be a bit less fraught than the horrors alluded to previously.

/john