Quote:
Originally Posted by theducks
fmtx1 is Front matter alternate body style 1
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I absolutely hate those naming conventions, for so many reasons:
- The editor/designer just keeps incrementing the number for slight changes, which doesn't tell you why its different or what its really being used for.
- The names are meaningless because you often see a "front-matter" style used on an epilogue, afterword, etc., just because it happed to match the formatting they wanted. Since the designer isn't shy about creating new styles for even tiny changes (see point #1), this is particularly painful.
- In one book, "fmtx1" means "paragraph with no indent and 1em margins top and bottom. In another, it means "paragraph with 2em left margin and -1.5em text indent (hanging indent)". Because of this, the name is useless, because it conveys no information other than "front matter paragraph of some sort"...except when it doesn't (see #2)
- Longish (we don't need full sentences), meaningful names are far easier for everybody to use. Instead of "fmtx1", how about "FrontMatter-p-noindent". Much better for both veterans and newbies. Note that because all eBooks are inside a ZIP format, the length of the class name adds negligible size to the file. And, it adds negligible memory use because the classes are all turned into lookups by the parser. So, class="xy" uses the same amount of memory as class="SuperDuperLongClassNameThatIsTooLong".
- All those "special" classes are often just dupes of other classes, and the fact that they are in the "front matter" make no real difference...it's still just a plain old indented paragraph.
- 99% of "special" classes can be tossed out the window if the designers were taught the CSS box model. There is no reason to create classes to style paragraphs so they can be used for block quotes (all have left and right margins, first has top margin, last has bottom margin). Just slap the plain old body paragraph inside a DIV that creates the block.