On Fri, Nov 28, 2003 at 09:46:11AM +0100, Andre Poenitz spake thusly:
I would not trust in an eternal existence of different implementations of 'logical' and 'physical' markup... Even if there is a theoretic difference I can't see a technical reason requiring two implementations.
However, I think LyX should strive for using logical mark-up only... if we find that, e.g., someone is underlining text elements, we should ask *why* he is doing that, i.e., what does he try to express... semantic mark-up. And then create a logical mark-up style to support that.
For underline, all I can think of is a typewriter lacking an italic font... i.e. "typewriter emph". Or (together with blue) a hyperlink.
...and yes, I think (agree?) that character attributes (size/bold/italic/...) ought to die off... but we cannot just remove them, as they are in old docs. Discourage their use ("finger painting") together with providing logical character (and paragraph) styles to make them unnecessary.
Old docs will need a converter anyway, the converter may notice that the user used "bold" or "underline" and create such a style in the converted document. So the old style system can be removed without breaking compatibility. Of course the converter can't guess the true menaing of the markup and will resort to style names like "underlined-for-some-reason" . . .
Helge Hafting
