Re: [office] renewed proposal for new position and space attributes for the list level

[Thomas Zander <zander@kde.org>]

On Monday 05 March 2007 09:55, Oliver-Rainer Wittmann - Software Engineer - 
Sun Microsystems wrote:
> We are on the style level to specify how the list items are laid out.
> Thus, it doesn't makes sense to specify only part of the list item
> layout at the list style and specify the the other part - namely the
> indents - on each paragraph separately and redundant.
> That's the purpose of styles - specifying something, thus, it's not
> needed that each item specifies it again and again.

Sorry, but I honestly do think you are mixing things up here. Or at minimum 
making things waaay to complex in your own mind.

As you know; each paragraph follows a paragraph style.
Each list item has a style for the list-specific part of the paragraph.

Its obvious to me that when you use a specific liststyle with different 
paragraph-styles you get different results based on the different paragraph 
properties like text-indent. Simple and straightforward.

And your argument is that its a bad thing that multiple paragraphs *styles* 
doing the same paragraph-indent is duplication somehow?
Further; you then go on to copy those settings to the list-style which ensures 
that each (numbered) paragraph has it twice, and state that that's a better 
idea.

My continuing problem with this is that you want to have a lot of properties 
that are already specified on a paragraph-style to also be on a list-style. 
Even while the main thing they influence is the paragraph-indent. Which 
duplicates options and makes it much more difficult for implementations to 
actually implement the spec. It additionally makes it much more difficult for 
an actual user to understand all these properties and how they interact.

Rob blogged about what makes a good standard not to long ago;
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/02/anatomy-of-interoperability.html
Read point 6;
  "Feature Creep — A standard can collapse under its own weight. There is 
often a trade-off between expressiveness of a standard (what features it can 
describe) and the ease of implementation. The ideal is to be very expressive 
as well as easy to implement. If a standard attempts to do everything that 
everyone could possibly want, and does so indiscriminately, then the unwieldy 
complexity of the standard will make it more difficult for implementations to 
implement, and this will hinder interoperability."

Lets keep that in mind, shall we?
-- 
Thomas Zander

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