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We are in a fully programmable environment, and it is extremely unConTeXtish to hack the visual appearance.
I am an XML author, so am pretty amazed to hear that one should not mix appearance and content in ConTeXt. Most of a ConTeXt document involves visual appearance. What is one saying when one writes \blank[12pt]?
This is visual appearance, of cource. But I am not talking about one single instance of \blank anywhere, I am talking about changing a reaeated statement (like the footnotes) by visual means. And formatting instructions have no right to exist there (in fact they should be filtered out by \sanitizelogigalmarkup{\footnote...}. This is one of the great advantages of using a high level language such as LaTeX or ConTeXt (and ConTeXt so much more than LaTeX) that we can define layout in this way. Since you come from an XML background and only have to change your stylesheet, the hackary is doable, nobody ever sees it. But this hackery is not to be used when using Context directly.
Yes, that would be nice. But until I see a concrete solution, I will continue to use and post my solution. A rule of etiquette is that if you don't have a better solution, or don't want to document it, don't attack the current solution, not matter how impure.
Sorry, but I strongly disagree. It is not nice to teach/show other people such code. They will take it for granted and put in their documents. I have seen far too many LaTeX documents where exactly this procedure leaded to unmaintainable code. It took me hours to extract and correct those ugly hacks. One example: a person learned how to remove indentation from a paragraph by saying \noindent. So every paragraph had a \noindent before the paragraph (instead of doing it right by saying \noindent0pt). And it was a long document (and the \noindent was just one of the stupid things). So my advice is not to publish such code without several dangerous bend signs. Patrick -- ConTeXt wiki: http://contextgarden.net