Currently, when you create or modify a paragraph style, character style or list
style you can change or add "attributes" to the style. Initially, the text below
"Contains:" in the Organiser tab of the style dialogue is empty or contains only
a few items. As you add "attributes" the list grows. However, there is no way of
removing those "attributes" again. Once specified, they remain forever.

Example: I write a document that contains some snippets of source code
interspersed into paragraphs of English prose set in 12pt. I format them using
the character style "Source Text" and change the fontsize of "Source Text" to
12pt and the fontstyle to italics. Later on, I find myself using some snippets
of source code in a footnote and again use the character style "Source Text" to
format them. However, as my footnotes are only 9pt the source code is formatted
to big now. In theory, I have two options now:

- Creating a second character style for source code in footnotes and specify the
fontsize to be 9pt. However, this solution makes only limited sense since my
real intention is to just use the fontsize of the paragraph the text appears in,
that is I really did not want to specify any fontsize in the character style.

- Reverting the specification of the fontsize in the Source Text character style
to "not specified". This way the source code would inherent the fontsize from
the paragraph that it appears in.

In practice, I only have the first option as the second is currently not
provided by OpenOffice. In this example, it was indeed a mistake to specify the
fontsize for the character style in the first place. However, there should be
some way of rectifying this. In fact, during the lifecycle of a document it
might have indeed made some sense to specify the fontsize for the character
style at some point (maybe we wanted source code to appear smaller than the rest
of the text) but later the author might have changed his/her mind. Currently,
there is no way of doing this properly as I regard the first option above as
impractical.

The same applies to paragraph styles and list styles and maybe (I haven't really
thought about that enough) to page styles and frame styles. It not only applies
to style attributes being inherited from surrounding text, as in the example
above, but also to style attributes being inherited from a style's parent style.
That is, if the user overrides an attribute in a child style that has been
inherited from its parent style, there should be a way of removing that override
again.

Especially with the introduction of the ODF, a highly structured document
format, the ability to remove specifications from styles is a necessity for
authoring structured documents. Inheritance of styles is a very powerful thing,
but it seems that there is currently one piece missing in the puzzle that would
unfold its full potential.

Therefore, I suggest to add the ability to remove attributes from all kinds of
styles. This could be done with checkboxes next to pretty much all of the
controls in the style dialogues. Initially, those checkboxes would be set to
unticked. Whenever the user specifies an attribute, e.g. the fontsize, the
corresponding checkbox gets automatically ticked. The user has the ability to
untick the checkbox at any time later in the lifecycle of the document, which
could (not sure if it should) disable the corresponding control, e.g. the
fontsize listbox.