I also am a little flummoxed by this, but I think maybe I see the reasoning behind it. It has to do with the difference between the way CSS “styles” are written and the way page layout applications write code. And also what’s considered good CSS practice. But I might be wrong!
OK, I know CSS styles are written into the HTML documents. (Or kept as a main style sheet, but I don’t think that matters.) I also think that, in good practice, CSS styles are supposed to be cascading. That is, if I have a “main style” for, say, paragraphs of text, it should be defined to be a dot-p style. Then, any “styles” that could possibly be applied to text styled with the dot-p style are written as “substyles” of dot-p.
But here’s where CSS gets a bit wonky compared to the page layout applications I’m used to. If I look at Tagged Text exported from InDesign or --god forbid-- Quark XPress, character level tags are just wrapped around the text. Non-defined tags, such as bold or italic, just get stuck in as appropriate.
In the source code for CSS based HTML from FW, all the tags I see are defined in terms of Classes. (And note that here I know only enough to be dangerous.) The Classes are defined in the CSS style sheet. ALL tagging seems to want to be, I assume according to best practice, some subset of some other Class.
In other words, FW doesn’t want to just wrap an “em” or “strong” or “font color” around some text, and be done with it. But if I’ve got three or four or dozens of types of paragraph level styling defined – .pindentfirst, .pindentfirstpadleft, blah blah blah-- every time I apply a “style” such as coloring to one of those paragraphs, FW wants to be able to create yet another subsubsub Class that it can write into the CSS styles in my HTML document header: .pindentfirstcoloryellow, or whatever, and apply to my HTML text as a class, not just a lone tag.
Well, that’s probably a good idea, as far as it goes. But then if I want to add some yellow text to a paragraph styled .pindentfirstpadleft, FW insists that’s going to be yet another style, and creates a temp style, right? So FW creates one of these temporary styles to very helpfully tell me it’s going to write that style --which according to it I haven’t yet defined, and I guess in some arcane CSS best practice system, I haven’t-- into my HTML page. Whew. For instance, I have a permanent .style4 in a document I’ve been creating with exquisite, excruciating care to use only Edited Styles. The d*mnable style does nothing except align left. And I’ve no way that I can find to Find what text this has this orphan, useless, redundant style.
(And yes, I know I must have done something to create it. It’s my fault, but it still drives me crazy. It’s too helpful, because there’s no way now to fix my document so that the style doesn’t have to be written as such. It can’t really be best practice to have all these orphan styles bloating my HTML. They should be organized into the style sheet. But now I can’t do that, without going through my entire FW document, word by word, watching the Inspector to see where this subsubsubsubsub…style has been applied. Or am I missing some nifty trick to Find By Style?)
So I think, if I knew I was going to have 2 styles, each of which might get some yellow text, I’d need four FW styles.
Is that more or less correct? And if so, how do we stop it? Or maybe, how do we write cascading styles so that we can base them on each other, include the ability to make some little bit of text some “style” (particular font, color, weight, etc.) we know we’re going to want to use, but not have like a jillion different syles?
I can’t find any information in the FW documentation about basing styles on styles. I kind of think that’s what I need to be doing to avoid the subsubsub… temporary styles syndrome. But maybe not! any advice on this would be greatly appreciated.
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