“Style” and “formatting” tags on Meta: synonyms?

Question

In the real world, there are any number of ways to distinguish style from formatting, but on Meta.EL&U, neither has been specified in the tag wikis. They are both a jumble of questions about which type of formatting to use to represent different elements in a post, about how to indicate such formatting in Markdown, about SE changing the visual presentation of those elements, and about tone and writing style.

Tagged with formatting:

1. About formatting ellipses
2. Should we fix backticks?
3. What's the best way to format quotes within quotes?

Tagged with style:

4. What emphasis to use when referring to words?
5. Inline quotes formatting
6. Should we have a standard way of indicating deliberately malformed sentences?

Tagged with neither:

7. Formatting a Quote
8. Fancier "Quote" formatting.
9. Is Underlining Available as a Markup Format

Neither formatting nor style is heavily used, each with 15–16 posts. Therefore, I propose merging them as style with formatting as a synonym, followed by cleanup relegating a few questions to design and others.

Alternatively, a case can certainly made for keeping them distinct, but as they are currently used almost interchangeably, I suspect it may not be worth the upkeep on a relatively small number of questions.

Answer 1

Right now, style is a synonym for writing-style, which is the master.

Meanwhile, formatting is gone, although format exists and matches 13 questions, mostly closed. One could make formatting the master and format the synonym, but I don’t find the tag particularly clear as things stand.

This is because that searching for questions that happen to contain format (or formatting, etc.) yields around 400 results that are all over the place, with some being about orthography, some about typography/typesetting, others about citation formats, and still others about general layout design questions.

I agree it doesn’t seem very well understood and agreed upon, and there is no tag wiki excerpt guidance for it.

I don’t reckon it would be the best idea to merge the existing format questions with writing-style any longer, but this is just a hunch. If you could please look them over and perhaps update your request for the current scenario, perhaps we can get these taken care of, one way or the other.