> <B>
> <I>

Of course, these two elements are presentational tags, not structural tags
and have no place in a text editor that is producing content for delivery on
multiple platforms.

> Clearly, _most_ writers like to give *emphasis* and some 
> degree of NUANCE 
> to their writing.

While I completely agree with that, how often is that actually done? I
rarely see bold words used in the newspaper to indicate emphasis on a word,
for example.

I do see novels sometimes use various formatting to show some sort of
non-written meaning, but usually, that text is structural in some form or
another (like a novel quoting letters using courier.)

So...while the author MAY be thinking they they'd like to use a visual style
to add meaning to an item, they probably are simply further structuring
their document. Perhaps the issue is that authors need to see the connection
between their want of a adding visual style to it's structural meaning.

Let's also bring in some real-world issues. A lot of content authors are not
experienced/formal writers. As such, offering an untrained writer formatting
options simply makes them an unexperienced graphic designer. Granted, there
is a range here and we should accomodate both the expert writer and the
secretary who both have to update content.

> Why else would we have all those smiley faces on 
> the net?  :-)

Well, because email is a very informal and abbreviated form of text based
communiction. I don't think any writer would acknowledge common email
formatting habits as an acceptable style guide. ;o)

I think I may have asked this previously, but are any CMSs using a
WYSIWYG-like editor that draws the style widgets directly from a CSS or XLST
document? I'd like to see a simple editor that has the ability to pull in a
set of XML tags and CSS based on the type of document being created and then
only showing and rendering the tags available for that particular piece of
content. For instance, if the author is creating a press release, It would
only bring in and style the following XML tags: title, date, location,
author, quote.

-Darrel
--
http://cms-list.org/
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