[Pro] Can't Stop .style1. .style 2...

Freeway
21

Here’s some feedback from tech support that may help clarify some of the problems we less-than-experts have been having with Freeway. It makes me want to curl up in the fetal position on the floor and sob like a baby.

[Your] text issue is simply down to the way that Freeway handles styling. When a tag is applied to some text and then you apply another tag to it, Freeway doesn’t know if you really intended to change that tag or to apply more styling and, because you can’t have two tag styles applied to the same text it creates a temporary style. Because this style is temporary, if you then choose to apply a different tag again, the old temporary style (because it isn’t being used any more) will simply be replaced by a new temporary style of the same name - this way, it doesn’t create a new temporary style each time a new tag is applied.

If you apply a tag style to some text and then you want to change it to a new tag style, you need to remove the styling first. This can be done by working with the Styles and Colors palette open while you work (then you can simply select the text and click on [No Style]) or you can go to Style>Remove Styling and then apply the new tag style.

As I’ve suggested in different emails, using a “tag and class” style in the way you are doing can, and often does, cause a behavior that you may consider inconsistent with what you believe should happen. The bottom line is that Freeway won’t simply remove the old tag when a new tag is applied. You can, however, create a custom CSS style (with no tag) called “blue” for instance, and this can be applied to any text regardless of what tag it has - so this will work on text with the

tag, the

tag, etc., and character styling (font, size, color, etc.) can be used on single words without affecting the rest of the paragraph.

If you create an untagged CSS style for “blue”, “green”, “first indent”, “centeralign”, etc., then you will probably end up with less styles than working the way you currently work.

There isn’t a problem with changing the core tag style (by selecting it in the Edit Styles dialog) and then applying the basic font, color, etc., you want to work with on your site. If, as you mentioned, the client comes back and wants to change the color of all the

text, then you can simply change the color in that tag. The result will be the same as it would be if you use the “tag and class” method you currently use.

You should also bear in mind that anything embedded within the flow of a text item can also pick up styling from the

tag. This is one of the reasons why I create a tag called “body” as I mentioned in my last email.

I can understand the logic behind the method you use, but Freeway’s method of working with styles dictates that it’s best to use tags and class styles independently of each other. This is something which is always being looked into, and it might be that it may change in a future version.

Coming from a design for print background, I was initially confused with CSS styles in web design - but I soon realized that the styling method used in Desktop Publishing (in Quark, InDesign, etc.) is very different (and far simpler) as the styling doesn’t cascade down for the document, the page or a text item and then down to the text within the item.

So, “Freeway doesn’t know” if I want to change or add. It then just blithely adds, creating temp styles to encompass the style 1 plus style 2 situation. [Imagine me slumping in the chair, trying to continue breathing.] Why in the holy bloody hell anyone writing a program like FW would NOT of course assume I wanted to change from one tag to another is beyond me, but there it is. I mean, isn’t that the whole d*mned purpose of having different tags, and classes? Apply tag/style 1, get result 1. Apply tag/style 2, get style 2.

I suppose the tech’s comments about cascading help make some sense of the FW philosophy. This is down to the back-asswards software engineer concept of cascading CSS in general. Which has nothing to do with Style Sheets “cascading,” but means, in English-language-challenged-software-engineer-speak, “browser calculations of how to apply styling cascading.”

And now, given some hidden assumptions, it begins to make some sense. (Although the FW system is still fundamentally wrongheaded.) The main hidden assumption is that all text, immediately upon being entered, is wrapped in “p” tags. Therefore, unless some other tag is applied, all text wil receive “p” attributes when browsed. As well as any attributes cascadingly applied by styling the text’s DIV (HTML item), or the page, or whatever. OK, I can see that, it’s the way CSS works.

So, I don’t have to create tagged styles. As my tech says, “You can…create a custom CSS style (with no tag) called “blue” for instance, and this can be applied to any text regardless of what tag it has.” Because FW will write that “blue” class into the HTML for me, and browsers will calculate display accordingly, whether the text is tagged “h” or “li” orwhatever. All well and good. Except that…

It means that if I have five possible attributes to apply to text, and in some instances I want to apply, say, attributes 1, 2 and 3, but later want the same text styled with attributes 1, 4 and 5, I have to manually remove 2 and 3 before applying 4 and 5, or I’ll have one of these d*mnable temp styles created. As far as I can see. To me, that’s idiotic. Unless I’m misunderstanding something.

The thing that galls me about this is my tech’s saying “If you create an untagged CSS style for “blue”, “green”, “first indent”, “centeralign”, etc., then you will probably end up with less styles than working the way you currently work.” As if styling text could be reduced to these couple of basic “color, indent, alignment” choices. Web sites I’ve created have, heck, I don’t know, three or four dozen individual styles that comprise different combinations of attributes.

So for every paragraph, I’m supposed to either choose multiple styles from these proposed menus of individual attributes (which will then need to run into multiple dozens, because I’ll need to have multiple choices for each attribute) and manipulate this stuff manually. Or, I’ll have to manually wipe out all styling every time I want to change a paragraph from one style to another. Which will of course wipe out any character level styling I’ve done.

This is not a system.

And it still doesn’t explain Robert’s problem, which I encounter a hundred times a day, of temp styles being created by the mere act of typing.

This is NOT a system.

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Hi Bucky,

On 24 Apr 2010, at 07:24, Bucky Edgett wrote:

The thing that galls me about this is my tech’s saying “If you create an untagged CSS style for “blue”, “green”, “first indent”, “centeralign”, etc., then you will probably end up with less styles than working the way you currently work.” As if styling text could be reduced to these couple of basic “color, indent, alignment” choices. Web sites I’ve created have, heck, I don’t know, three or four dozen individual styles that comprise different combinations of attributes.

So for every paragraph, I’m supposed to either choose multiple styles from these proposed menus of individual attributes (which will then need to run into multiple dozens, because I’ll need to have multiple choices for each attribute) and manipulate this stuff manually. Or, I’ll have to manually wipe out all styling every time I want to change a paragraph from one style to another. Which will of course wipe out any character level styling I’ve done.

What Keith was saying was, in order to guarantee that Freeway uses the tag that you want (your example before on this list was that selecting h1, then selecting h1.whatever, then h2 would result in h1.omg) you shouldn’t use tagged classes. If you had applied h1, then .whatever you would get exactly the same result as selecting h1.whatever (the output would be identical to site visitors). You would also get the added bonus of being able to use the .whatever style on anything else that you like, without needing to create more (redundant) styles such as p.whatever, h2.whatever, h3.whatever and so on.

This is not a system.

The system was (its inception was quite a few years ago now) created to try and replicate true CSS with inheritance as much as possible. The fact that it can be confusing and annoying does not escape us at Softpress Towers. This debate and your points are a fantastic help, it really backs up some points that have been made internally for some time, and I’m sure it will help us develop this into better and more understandable in the future.

And it still doesn’t explain Robert’s problem, which I encounter a hundred times a day, of temp styles being created by the mere act of typing.

Looking back at Robert’s problem, it sounds like he is having the same problem as you. Robert, if you can clarify if you are using tag styles in the same way as explained above, or in Bucky’s post of a few days ago that would be great. Or even better, if you could provide steps, including full style names then we can let you know what is going on.

Joe

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I have a head style created called .head in the name with no tag specified. It also uses a color that I created which is included in the style and not styled separately.

Under Character I set: Font, Size, Color. Under Paragraph I set: Align, Leading, Space Before, Space After.

I style some text, everything good. I type over it, I get a new temporary style.

That’s it in it’s simplest form.

Bob

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24

When you say “type over it” what do you mean? You select it all and replace it, or you place the text insertion point somewhere specific (or random for that matter) and just add to it?

Joe

On 24 Apr 2010, at 16:33, Robert B wrote:

I have a head style created called .head in the name with no tag specified. It also uses a color that I created which is included in the style and not styled separately.

Under Character I set: Font, Size, Color. Under Paragraph I set: Align, Leading, Space Before, Space After.

I style some text, everything good. I type over it, I get a new temporary style.

That’s it in it’s simplest form.

Bob

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Probably both, but in the case of the head, I would select the head, not the paragraph mark, and type over it.

In large paragraphs, I probably do both.

Bob

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I’m not answering for Robert here, but this reminds me of a related
issue. If you select all of the text in a paragraph, but not the last
line-break, you haven’t really selected the paragraph. Any style
modifications you add will take the form of a span that wraps all of
the content of the paragraph rather than modifying the paragraph tag
itself as you might expect. So you end up with (condensed into inline
styles for clarity):

<p style="color:black"><span style="color:white">Buncha text here.</

span>

Walter

On Apr 24, 2010, at 1:47 PM, Joe Billings wrote:

When you say “type over it” what do you mean? You select it all and
replace it, or you place the text insertion point somewhere specific
(or random for that matter) and just add to it?

Joe

On 24 Apr 2010, at 16:33, Robert B wrote:

I have a head style created called .head in the name with no tag
specified. It also uses a color that I created which is included in
the style and not styled separately.

Under Character I set: Font, Size, Color. Under Paragraph I set:
Align, Leading, Space Before, Space After.

I style some text, everything good. I type over it, I get a new
temporary style.

That’s it in it’s simplest form.

Bob

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On 24 Apr 2010, at 19:23, Walter Lee Davis wrote:

I’m not answering for Robert here, but this reminds me of a related issue. If you select all of the text in a paragraph, but not the last line-break, you haven’t really selected the paragraph. Any style modifications you add will take the form of a span that wraps all of the content of the paragraph rather than modifying the paragraph tag itself as you might expect. So you end up with (condensed into inline styles for clarity):

Buncha text here.

Thanks Walter. This is exactly what’s happening when I walk through your steps Robert. Saying that, using Command-A, or anything else, doesn’t get round this problem, the temporary style needs to be deleted manually after it has been generated.

I will log this problem on Monday but due to the fact it’s not a severe bug (it doesn’t cause a crash or prevent things from working) will make it fairly low priority. All I can really do is apologise for the annoyance, sorry.

Joe

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No problem, Joe. As long as it’s something that other people are seeing and Softpress is aware of it, that’s all I can ask for now.

I understand application crashing bugs are at the forefront.

Thanks to all for taking the time to go through this and prove I’m not losing my mind!

Bob

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Dear Joe,

Thanks for stepping in here. I’m slowly beginning to see just how wrongheaded this all is. Now, you say “If you had applied h1, then .whatever you would get exactly the same result as selecting h1.whatever (the output would be identical to site visitors). You would also get the added bonus of being able to use the .whatever style on anything else that you like, without needing to create more (redundant) styles such as p.whatever, h2.whatever, h3.whatever and so on.”

I’m not able to do anything like that without having to take at least several steps. If I have an h1 style, and a .blue style, I can apply the h1 by clicking into the paragraph and then selecting h1 in the Styles Palette. But then also selecting .blue in the Palette does nothing. In order to apply h1 and .blue, I must

  1. Doubleclick in paragraph to select all text
  2. Select h1 in Palette
  3. Select .blue in Palette

Is that the method I’m expected to use?

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30

Sorry, hit the “Send” button too soon.

You also say, “You would also get the added bonus of being able to use the .whatever style on anything else that you like, without needing to create more (redundant) styles such as p.whatever, h2.whatever, h3.whatever and so on.”

But of course the “redundant” styles are exactly what. I want a style structure that creates

level styles, with attendant attributes, and the ability to apply all CSS available attributes to whole paragraphs with one Palette click.

I also want the ability to create the whole magilla all over again for each individual CSS tag there is h1, h2, ul, ol, whatever the goofballs decide to allow.

And then also create individual styles that might be applied to small bits of text.

Of course I don’t want to work in a situation where I have two paragraphs styled with tags h1 and h3, and also styled with .something that can apparently only be applied manually (see previous post), and have the client come in and tell me, “Well, we like the headlines in light gray, but we want the subheads put back to black.”

In that case, I would really like to have a working style system whereby all the h1 level colors or whatever can be edited separately from their similar h3 level attributes.

And for that matter, from similar attributes applied to

level text.

Or am I misunderstanding something? Page 209 of the Freeway5Reference seems to be telling me to work the way I have, probably mistakenly, been.

Thanks for being patient!

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On 25 Apr 2010, at 21:59, Bucky Edgett wrote:

Thanks for stepping in here. I’m slowly beginning to see just how wrongheaded this all is. Now, you say “If you had applied h1, then .whatever you would get exactly the same result as selecting h1.whatever (the output would be identical to site visitors). You would also get the added bonus of being able to use the .whatever style on anything else that you like, without needing to create more (redundant) styles such as p.whatever, h2.whatever, h3.whatever and so on.”

I’m not able to do anything like that without having to take at least several steps. If I have an h1 style, and a .blue style, I can apply the h1 by clicking into the paragraph and then selecting h1 in the Styles Palette. But then also selecting .blue in the Palette does nothing. In order to apply h1 and .blue, I must

  1. Doubleclick in paragraph to select all text
  2. Select h1 in Palette
  3. Select .blue in Palette

Is that the method I’m expected to use?

If you are applying character level styles (i.e. color, font, size) then yes, you will need to select everything you want t appear that way. If you are applying paragraph level styles (i.e. alignment, indent, space-before and after) then you can place the text cursor anywhere within that paragraph. Because you can only ever have one paragraph level style applied at one time this will cause a temporary style to be created which is a combination of the style you applied and the style already applied. While this may seem odd, it’s the only way for things to work using the current model.

Sorry, hit the “Send” button too soon.

You also say, “You would also get the added bonus of being able to use the .whatever style on anything else that you like, without needing to create more (redundant) styles such as p.whatever, h2.whatever, h3.whatever and so on.”

But of course the “redundant” styles are exactly what. I want a style structure that creates

level styles, with attendant attributes, and the ability to apply all CSS available attributes to whole paragraphs with one Palette click.

I also want the ability to create the whole magilla all over again for each individual CSS tag there is h1, h2, ul, ol, whatever the goofballs decide to allow.

And then also create individual styles that might be applied to small bits of text.

Of course I don’t want to work in a situation where I have two paragraphs styled with tags h1 and h3, and also styled with .something that can apparently only be applied manually (see previous post), and have the client come in and tell me, “Well, we like the headlines in light gray, but we want the subheads put back to black.”

In that case, I would really like to have a working style system whereby all the h1 level colors or whatever can be edited separately from their similar h3 level attributes.

And for that matter, from similar attributes applied to

level text.

A valid point, and I can see how that would be useful, I would personally edit the styles already applied to the text in this instance, rather than applying new styles and in turn generating new temporary styles because two paragraph level styles can’t be applied to the same paragraph. Are you saying that you would rather have the second style you are applying remove the first style and replace it completely with the new one? If so I can add that to our suggestions database.

Or am I misunderstanding something? Page 209 of the Freeway5Reference seems to be telling me to work the way I have, probably mistakenly, been.

The reference does say that you can do this, but I think that assumes you will be making global changes to styles (page 218).

Joe

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Dear Joe,

Yes, I see it all now! Thank you so much for clearing this up. I’ve been laboring under assumptions brought in from decades of page layout programs, without ever digging into Freeway’s system.

“A valid point, and I can see how that would be useful, I would personally edit the styles already applied to the text in this instance, rather than applying new styles and in turn generating new temporary styles because two paragraph level styles can’t be applied to the same paragraph. Are you saying that you would rather have the second style you are applying remove the first style and replace it completely with the new one? If so I can add that to our suggestions database.”

But if I “edit the styles already applied,” I’ll be making global changes to a color style. Which would mean all blue text would change color. I want to make changes to tags, not to colors. In this instance–and it is a simplistic one–the change happens to be a color change. It might be a font change, or any other attribute FW now applies only to characters.

“The reference does say that you can do this, but I think that assumes you will be making global changes to styles (page 218).”

Yes, and that’s exactly what I want to do, and from reading the manual ages ago, assumed I would be doing. As I have been. But working that way is also exactly what causes the proliferation of all these Mystery Temp Styles.

In FW, there are attributes applicable only to characters, right? That’s the aspect of this I, as an old DTP guy, didn’t understand. Under this system, any time I’ve used a Style that includes Character Level attributes, any Style subsequently applied must contain that attribute, and must be applied to all the text being styled, or whammo, temp style .omg.

That seems odd to me. All the examples in tutorials on CSS write things like

p{ color: red; font-size: 20px; }
p.test1{ color: blue; }
p.test2{ font-size: 12px; }

So, when you ask “Are you saying that you would rather have the second style you are applying remove the first style and replace it completely with the new one? If so I can add that to our suggestions database.” I say, yes, of course. That’s the whole point of having supposedly “tagged” styles: the styling is supposed to be applied by means of the tag+class, which is supposed to wrap and thereby affect, the entire paragraph and every character in it.

But FW considers–erroneously, I would say–some attributes to be automatically and only on what I would call a span level. (See waltd, above.) FW calls it Character Level. So even though I’ve created h1.red and h1.green, the .red and .green attributes are treated as if they were a span, not part of the tag. Blah. No good. But thanks for explaining. The Mystery Temp Styles are almost cleared up.

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Joe said…

What Keith was saying was, in order to guarantee that Freeway uses the tag that you want (your example before on this list was that selecting h1, then selecting h1.whatever, then h2 would result in h1.omg) you shouldn’t use tagged classes. If you had applied h1, then .whatever you would get exactly the same result as selecting h1.whatever (the output would be identical to site visitors).

The rub is the word “exactly.” If I apply styling using the two different methods, here’s the result:

[open]H1 CLASS=“green”[close]Huh?[open]/H1[close]

[open]H1 [close open] SPAN CLASS=“blue”[close]Huh?[close]/SPAN [close open] /H1[close]

I’m sorry I don’t know how to escape this stuff, but I hope you get the idea. Now, true, the result would be identical to viewers. The results within FW are the Mystery Temp Styles, hours worth of lost time, and the inability to discriminate between the blue attributes of different tags, paragraph styles, etc.

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To escape your code on the Web, you can use four tildes in a row all
by themselves on a line before your block of code, followed by another
four tildes in a row all by themselves on a line after your block of
code. For a single word or phrase, begin and end with a single back-
tick character (shares the keycap with the tilde on the US Mac
keyboard. The back-tick has to “touch” the beginning or end of the
word or phrase. Any spaces will cause the converter to ignore it and
just print a back-tick.

This is a block of code

This is a word of code in a sentence.

If you’re looking at this on the Web, then you will just see the
formatted result. If you use Mail, then naturally you will see the
unescaped glory of raw text.

Here’s just the raw text: http://pastie.org/936185

The live preview you see while you are composing on the Web is
precisely what you will see when your message is published – your
message is run through exactly the same escaper that is used online.
One function, about 48 regular expressions in a row, plus an
invocation of PHP Markdown (which is itself several dozen functions
and hundreds of regular expressions).

All hail the power of Regexp.

Walter

On Apr 26, 2010, at 3:08 PM, Bucky Edgett wrote:

Joe said…

What Keith was saying was, in order to guarantee that Freeway uses
the tag that you want (your example before on this list was that
selecting h1, then selecting h1.whatever, then h2 would result in
h1.omg) you shouldn’t use tagged classes. If you had applied h1,
then .whatever you would get exactly the same result as selecting
h1.whatever (the output would be identical to site visitors).

The rub is the word “exactly.” If I apply styling using the two
different methods, here’s the result:

[open]H1 CLASS=“green”[close]Huh?[open]/H1[close]

[open]H1 [close open] SPAN CLASS=“blue”[close]Huh?[close]/SPAN
[close open] /H1[close]

I’m sorry I don’t know how to escape this stuff, but I hope you get
the idea. Now, true, the result would be identical to viewers. The
results within FW are the Mystery Temp Styles, hours worth of lost
time, and the inability to discriminate between the blue attributes
of different tags, paragraph styles, etc.

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“Back-tick”? I always thought it was an accent gràve. As opposed to an ácute. Let’s see if that escapes!

And thank you for the lesson. I’ll try to do better from now on.

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36

On 26 Apr 2010, at 16:41, Bucky Edgett wrote:

But if I “edit the styles already applied,” I’ll be making global changes to a color style. Which would mean all blue text would change color. I want to make changes to tags, not to colors. In this instance–and it is a simplistic one–the change happens to be a color change. It might be a font change, or any other attribute FW now applies only to characters.

Yes, this is why you’d create a style with all those attributes - a style for headings , for bodytext, for subheadings, for the sidebar etc etc. When the client inevitably says, “actually, I want the subheadings to be dark red and Helvetica” you alter the subheadings style that is applied to your text, whether it’s in an h1, h2, h3, a p or anything.

When I work this way, I only ever get temporary styles when I apply formatting through the Inspector palette, unless I apply exactly the same formatting as an existing style. Limiting yourself to only being able to change that particular style for one tag is, well, limiting.

“The reference does say that you can do this, but I think that assumes you will be making global changes to styles (page 218).”

Yes, and that’s exactly what I want to do, and from reading the manual ages ago, assumed I would be doing. As I have been. But working that way is also exactly what causes the proliferation of all these Mystery Temp Styles.

In FW, there are attributes applicable only to characters, right? That’s the aspect of this I, as an old DTP guy, didn’t understand. Under this system, any time I’ve used a Style that includes Character Level attributes, any Style subsequently applied must contain that attribute, and must be applied to all the text being styled, or whammo, temp style .omg.

That seems odd to me. All the examples in tutorials on CSS write things like

p{ color: red; font-size: 20px; }
p.test1{ color: blue; }
p.test2{ font-size: 12px; }

There are many ways to work with CSS, and Freeway allows you to do many of them, the one you’re trying unfortunately has an annoying side effect of creating temporary styles.

So, when you ask “Are you saying that you would rather have the second style you are applying remove the first style and replace it completely with the new one? If so I can add that to our suggestions database.” I say, yes, of course. That’s the whole point of having supposedly “tagged” styles: the styling is supposed to be applied by means of the tag+class, which is supposed to wrap and thereby affect, the entire paragraph and every character in it.

Consider it done :slight_smile:

But FW considers–erroneously, I would say–some attributes to be automatically and only on what I would call a span level. (See waltd, above.) FW calls it Character Level. So even though I’ve created h1.red and h1.green, the .red and .green attributes are treated as if they were a span, not part of the tag. Blah. No good. But thanks for explaining. The Mystery Temp Styles are almost cleared up.

On 26 Apr 2010, at 20:08, Bucky Edgett wrote:

Joe said…

What Keith was saying was, in order to guarantee that Freeway uses the tag that you want (your example before on this list was that selecting h1, then selecting h1.whatever, then h2 would result in h1.omg) you shouldn’t use tagged classes. If you had applied h1, then .whatever you would get exactly the same result as selecting h1.whatever (the output would be identical to site visitors).

The rub is the word “exactly.” If I apply styling using the two different methods, here’s the result:

[open]H1 CLASS=“green”[close]Huh?[open]/H1[close]

[open]H1 [close open] SPAN CLASS=“blue”[close]Huh?[close]/SPAN [close open] /H1[close]

I’m sorry I don’t know how to escape this stuff, but I hope you get the idea. Now, true, the result would be identical to viewers. The results within FW are the Mystery Temp Styles, hours worth of lost time, and the inability to discriminate between the blue attributes of different tags, paragraph styles, etc.

Yes, in the code the result will be different but the end result to the user is exactly the same. Thank you for taking the time to explain how you are expecting things to work and I apologise for the inconvenience/annoyance.

Joe

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37

Dear Joe,

You are a gentleman and a scholar. This thread has certainly gone way beyond its original purpose, and you’ve been very patient.

I hope other FWers will get some education from it!

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38

I am glad to see this come up as I have dealt with it from day one and it is maddening. I am glad the SP folks will finally look into this and would like to add one more thing:

Span styles are are created when simply typing or pasting over selected text even if it is within a single paragraph that has a single paragraph level style.

The need to constantly clean up these temp styles is one of the biggest time wasters in FW for me. I would welcome a global preference that, when set, would only allow you to apply formatting from a permanent style (if that is what it takes to fix this).

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Hi,

By default, Freeway will respect styling when pasting text (as much as it can). To stop this from happening, use the standard OS X shortcut for pasting without styling (or more accurately, match existing styling), Command-Option-Shift-V.

Joe

On 27 Apr 2010, at 23:59, Solutions Etcetera wrote:

I am glad to see this come up as I have dealt with it from day one and it is maddening. I am glad the SP folks will finally look into this and would like to add one more thing:

Span styles are are created when simply typing or pasting over selected text even if it is within a single paragraph that has a single paragraph level style.

The need to constantly clean up these temp styles is one of the biggest time wasters in FW for me. I would welcome a global preference that, when set, would only allow you to apply formatting from a permanent style (if that is what it takes to fix this).

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On 27 Apr 2010, 10:59 pm, Solutions Etcetera wrote:

The need to constantly clean up these temp styles is one of the biggest time wasters in FW for me. I would welcome a global preference that, when set, would only allow you to apply formatting from a permanent style (if that is what it takes to fix this).

For me, and I’m probably going to be the odd man out, I want to see the Style Editing dialog eliminate the distinction between Character and Paragraph.

It seems to me most of the Mystery Temp Styles issue is created by this artificial distinction, held within the FW coding. Any time an FW Style contains Character styling, FW treats the Character styling as if it were going to be a Span, even when the Style has Paragraph Level attributes.

I’ve quoted Solutions on this, because the relevant distinction in FW is not between Permanent and Temp styles. The relevant distinction is between FW’s Character and Paragraph styling.

Maybe I don’t know enough about CSS to understand why FW was written to have this distinction? I’m not aware of any CSS rules that require certain attributes to be applied by a span. As I said above, many tutorials show CSS Classes containing all the attributes FW considers Character/Treat-them-as-a-span attributes.

Now, certainly many attributes apply only to paragraphs. But any attribute should be applicable as a paragraph level Class, and then should be replaced and ignored when applying another paragraph level Class style.

Does this make sense? I’m totally on about this, and may be the last person wanting to beat this poor horse, because I want to be able to completely control my FW document globally. To apply color, font, size, etc. to paragraphs by means of Permanent Styles, certainly. But also to be able to edit all styles (globally) and know what was going to happen to every attribute of every bit of text. And have any hand applied spans honored when applying new paragraph styles.

It seems to me the only way to be able to do this is to eliminate FW’s current method of applying Character/Treat-them-as-a-span attributes. And I assume that’s embedded so deeply within FW’s internal coding, it might be nigh impossible.

I do appreciate the effort at Sawftpress Towers to account for the difference between FW’s Character and Paragraph styling with temporary styles. It’s actually a very helpful way of letting FW do the work! And when web sites were less elaborate than they’ve quickly become, it made sense.

If I weren’t such a fossil, immured in the ancient stone of print text and typography, all this wouldn’t be so confusing. So please everyone excuse my ramblings!

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