A question about text:span and styles

In the following:
<span style="italic">italic <span style="bold">thistext</span></span> 

if the style called "bold" simply sets the character property bold=true and
doesn't derive from any other style, should the text "thistext" be
only bold, or should it be bold+italic?

I think it should be bold+italic, and testing in OpenOffice.org seems to indicate
this too, but the specification doesn't say much about style handling in
nested spans, so there is a bit of controversy about this among koffice
developers. Can we get a clear statement about the expected behavior
and possibly a sentence in the spec?

-- 
David Faure, , sponsored by Qt Software @ Nokia to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).