RE: link appearance and soft face properties

["Drew Adams" <drew.adams@oracle.com>]

    When you use emphasis and bold, you are speaking about two different
    kinds of markup, logical and physical.

Right. I wrote about the separation of "purpose/intention/use from physical
formatting", which was my way of characterizing logical vs physical or, as
someone else pointed out, semantic vs presentational. But I also mentioned
"user-changeable" vs "hard-wired". Admittedly, these are not identical
distinctions. However, in this context, I think they are usefully combined:

 The ":underline" text property is a hard-wired, physical formatting spec.
 The ":link" text property I was proposing is a user-changeable, logical
spec.

 :link is user-changeable: users can determine what the ultimate appearance
is.

 :link is logical: it represents a purpose/intention/use that is more
abstract than that of underlining. What makes it more abstract? The fact
that there can be different (physical) manifestations/implementations
(regardless of whether or not users can define those physical realizations).

So, I don't think it was a distraction to speak of "soft" in this context as
combining user-changeable and logical. It's true that "logical" markup can
refer simply to markup with different physical manifestations and letting
users choose the manifestation by choosing the context, without necessarily
letting them choose or define the physical form beyond that.

(I won't get into the name vs named distinction that you brought up; I think
it adds more heat than light here. Sorry if I wasn't clear, though.)

Anyway, as people have pointed out, it appears that face inheritance, not
text-property inheritance would be sufficient to realize what I was
suggesting.