questions about formatting in Xanadu

[Jack Seay <jackseay@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

If I remember correctly, in the specifications of Xanadu, it should  
try to keep track of formatting and capitalization, and apply them to  
a new version of a document. It seems to me that this could present a  
number of problems. For example, if it is attempted to automatically  
capitalize the first letter of the first word of a sentence, but  
change the case if that word is moved to the middle of the sentence,  
that would not work for proper names or acronyms. Also, if formatting  
such as bold, underline, font type and size applies to text  
(including nested and overlapping formatting), and words are moved  
around, added, and deleted; then how do you know what formatting to  
apply to the changed text?

What would seem a simpler and better solution is to simply have the  
formatting tags apply to spans of the permascroll. Make a set of  
these formatting tags into a "format set" to overlay onto any version  
of a document. If the document is edited into a new version, the old  
"format set" could still be applied to it, but would only apply  
formatting when it refers to the same characters in the permascroll.  
So a word that is capitalized, then moved from the start of the  
sentence to the middle would retain it's capitalization. If this is  
not what is wanted, two solutions could be used. Change the letter to  
non-capitalized, or apply a special format tag called "lowercase", so  
the same word in the permascroll is still pointed to  (and links  
don't break). While this will sometimes make editing more time  
consuming, (because manual capitalization changes will need to be  
made), it would avoid the use of complicated algorithms and leave the  
decisions regarding what are proper names and acronyms to the human  
editors.

I drew a diagram showing what I think might be a simple way of  
creating and applying format sets to versions of documents at http:// 
hyperworlds.org/mindmaps/VersionsFormats.html
Let me know what you think of these ideas, and if you see any errors.  
The diagram isn't intended to show any kind of completeness of  
structure, but just to conceptualize the general ideas of formatting  
in Xanadu.