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