| i think we too easily fall for the heuristic of separate files == separate concerns but your concerns arent really separate if, while in their separate files, they are concerned about the same things and, so long as you want relative styling, they always will be. you can either (1) attach properties to your tree or (2) flatten your tree into a list of paths and attach properties to nodes that match the paths in (1), changing the structure can only impact an individual node or it's children, only by the properties attached to the node and it's parents; changing the style can also only impact an individual node or its children in (2), changing structure can impact the individual node, it's children, siblings or parents by any rules that now match any of the mentioned nodes; changing style will impact all matching nodes (not all of whom can be identified statically) and their children and may interact with other rules which apply properties to matching nodes. either way, you cant escape the structure of the tree and one strategy lets you scope your changes easily, the other does not. |