However, should it not be possible for the software to find a minimal cover for the formatting that would produce the same visual output, thereby practically recovering what hard-crafted markup would have been?
Thanks.
p {b This} {b text is} {b bolded} this isn't
p {b This text is bolded} this isn't
In Polymath, I'm planning on allowing basically arbitrary CSS styling by parent, id, class, etc. So if the user later wants to do something like put a rounded box around each span of bolded text, those two, while initially looking identical in WYSIWYG, end up completely different.