Re: proposed convention for variation switching [wasRE:inheriting ...

["Adam Lindsay" <atl@comp.lancs.ac.uk>]

Idris Samawi Hamid said this at Fri, 22 Apr 2005 08:36:02 -0600:

>In any case whatever high-level framework we come up with should largely 
>be determined by your decision on the low/mid-level framework.

See, I beg to differ. 
Whatever high-level framework(s) we come up with should largely be
*independent* of what comes below. Implementation details change, but the
markup should live on independently. 

It's one of the drawbacks of these terse mid-level font switches (e.g.,
\ita). The brevity really helps save keying for users, and so they're
really inviting to be used by themselves in documents. The more
attractive and robust markup possibilities allowed by things like
\definestyle go unnoticed, and relatively unused.

So you can define your markup more semantically with \Emphasis{} and
\Acronym{} and \Arabic{} and \Bigger{} and \Slightlybolder{}, and Hans
can change the internals, you can change the font scheme, and everything
still manages to get along.

Disclaimer: I can't claim to have been doing things the structured way up
until now, but I've been thinking about it a lot lately.

adam
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 Adam T. Lindsay, Computing Dept.     atl@comp.lancs.ac.uk
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