#13 Ditch the <font> tags

[Dan]

I love your applet to bits (or is that bytecode), however
if you could say perhaps avoid the use of <font>, due to
its general nastyness.

This could be better expressed with CSS, and although
difficult to implement as a central stylesheet...

Perhaps this could be achieved with some kind of
background thread that checks whenever a new tag is
completed that requires stylistic-ishness (basically,
whenver Ekit feels the need for <font>) - cycles through
looking for identical <font> tags. These could be
collected together and reinterpreted as a CSS class.

IE
<font color="black">My text</font>
<font color="black">My text2</font>
<font color="white">My other text</font>
<font color="black">My text3</font>

The code is parsed, and <font color="black"> occurs
thrice; so then the attribute is interpreted into CSS.
<font color="white"> could probably be safely ignored, as
it is a once off occurance.
Replaces string <font color="black"></font> with <span
class="fontBlack"></span>.

Anyway, keep pluging away at it!

[Howard Kistler]

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Hey there,

While it would be nice indeed to escape from using FONT tags
and use something like "smart style", it's one of those
things that requires a lot of forwarding-thinking on the
program to handle. Ekit would not only have to create and
maintain these CSS properties that you suggest, but also
handle collisions in the CSS namespace, and furthermore
decide when to abandon one style for another (say, if you
change the font family for one instance of the "smart
style", but not others).

Of course, nothing prohibits making a thorough stylesheet in
advance, and then using the style selector to make all font
changes instead of the FONT tag based ones. But ultimately,
it would probably require a built-in CSS editor to allow for
new styles to be created on the fly without too much other
trouble.

Something to consider for a future release. Thanks for the
suggestion!

Howard Kistler

[Howard Kistler]

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user_id=103018

Good news - I'm in the process of fixing some of the worst
effects of the FONT tags by having style changes retain
existing styles. Already I've fixed the problem where
changing the font would also change the size. Hopefully I'll
have the rest done soon, so that it acts more responsibly
with fonts and less wonky.

Howard Kistler