Hi Marc, thanks for the feedback re: Xara.

I actually did spend some time looking at Xara about properties, although I was not aware of that name gallery part which is pretty cool.

It was after looking through Xara some that I was starting to notice a pattern of "named style" type batched properties (in Xara I think this a "named color") being kind of grafted on to various programs in addition to individual property editing more directly on an object.

I think historically editing individual properties directly on an object came first, and then later on "named styles" get added to try and make it easier to update a batch of objects just by editing one style template.

That kind of convinced me to try and emphasize the "named style" or "property template" type approach more as the main way to do things...

And yes - enabling a kind of "select by style" mechanism allows styling to be used as another kind of batching or organizing concept. It will be a kind of parallel organization system in a certain sense to the grouping mechanism.

In fact, I was thinking that it may be a good idea to let you choose what is exported as a "layer" to other formats - whether it should be the grouping structure, or whether it should be by visual style...

The way it is turning out for MoI I think is the "grouping" is a more structural and hierarchical thing and will be more focused on operating on a batch of objects for hiding and showing things.

Then styling is for visual appearance.

- Michael