OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC

In the following:
italic thistext 

if the style called "bold" simply sets the character property bold=true and
doesn't derive from any other style, should the text "thistext" be
only bold, or should it be bold+italic?

I think it should be bold+italic, and testing in OpenOffice.org seems to indicate
this too, but the specification doesn't say much about style handling in
nested spans, so there is a bit of controversy about this among koffice
developers. Can we get a clear statement about the expected behavior
and possibly a sentence in the spec?

-- 
David Faure, faure@kde.org, sponsored by Qt Software @ Nokia to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).

David,

the  element has been adopted from HTML, and it was intended that 
it works like in HTML. Which means "thistext" should be bold+italic.

Best regards

Michael

On 02/27/09 14:48, David Faure wrote:
> In the following:
> italic thistext 
> 
> if the style called "bold" simply sets the character property bold=true and
> doesn't derive from any other style, should the text "thistext" be
> only bold, or should it be bold+italic?
> 
> I think it should be bold+italic, and testing in OpenOffice.org seems to indicate
> this too, but the specification doesn't say much about style handling in
> nested spans, so there is a bit of controversy about this among koffice
> developers. Can we get a clear statement about the expected behavior
> and possibly a sentence in the spec?
> 


-- 
Michael Brauer, Technical Architect Software Engineering
StarOffice/OpenOffice.org
Sun Microsystems GmbH             Nagelsweg 55
D-20097 Hamburg, Germany          michael.brauer@sun.com
http://sun.com/staroffice         +49 40 23646 500
http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS

Sitz der Gesellschaft: Sun Microsystems GmbH, Sonnenallee 1,
	   D-85551 Kirchheim-Heimstetten
Amtsgericht Muenchen: HRB 161028
Geschaeftsfuehrer: Thomas Schroeder, Wolfgang Engels, Dr. Roland Boemer
Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrates: Martin Haering

Michael,

I think the important part of David's message is that, since ODF is not
HTML, we actually need to say what the rule is.  Absent a normative
statement, reasoning from similarity to some other specification is very
dangerous and certainly not something the standard should be written to rely
upon.

There is no crystal ball that says what the degree of similarity of
text:span with HTML  is.  I do think it is natural to assume that that
certain styles are "additive" when not contradictory, based on knowledge of
what HTML does, but I don't believe the ODF specification is explicit enough
about that in the text:span case.  I wonder how this works out in the in the
hierarchic resolution against default styles too. 

 - Dennis

PS: There is neither mention of HTML or reference to [HTML4] in conjunction
with the