Isn't this what style sheets are all about? You define a hierarchy of
logical tags that distinguishes between examples and comments, and you give
suggested fonts for each. The user can override them (perhaps the user is
running a text-to-speech browser and prefers a female voice for examples
and a male voice for comments), but the map to actual fonts/characteristics
should match the "shape" of your hierarchy of logical tags.
Am I misunderstanding the basic ideas here?
>Can we introduce a new mechanism? <ss> (for sans-serif)?
The last thing we need is a proliferation of hard-wired physical formatting
tags -- there is just no end to it. An extensible logical tagging system
can always be subverted for physical tagging, but it's very hard to recover
logical structure from physical tags.
----------------------
Michal Young
Purdue University
Software Engineering Research Center
Department of Computer Sciences
1398 Computer Science Building
West Lafayette, IN 47907-1398
voice: 317-494-6023
fax: 317-494-0739
URL: http://www.cs.purdue.edu/people/young
-----------------------