Using copy of hums site running in lang02 account (which contribute can successfully connect to - as opposed to copy of same files in hums site), tested to see how Contribute deals with css on standard xhtml elements and elements with classes.

In summary, it's going to be extremely difficult to use Contribute to maintain a site with typical css styling (e.g. the template files provided by web coordinator's office).
All the elements and classes appear in a drop-down list ready to apply, but there is no indication in the Contribute GUI of which elements and classes are applied to the current focus point. E.g. if the cursor is in an instance of an H2, the dropdown menu shows the current style as "bodytext", but if I choose H3, the tag is applied and the proper styling applied too. I see no way of having Contribute show me anything about the element with focus (let alone the tree for that element).

Checked the code generated by Contribute, and it is adding hard-coded style attributes into the xhtml which overwrite those in the style sheet for that element. E.g. the H3 tag in the css has margin settings, but the instance created by Contribute manually over-rides those with different margin settings. This happened even when I copied and pasted a selection. The duplicate had hard-coded style attributes not there in the original.

I could find no way of seeing html comments in Contribute, which means I cannot leave instructions as html comments, nor can I include templates as comments in the code. This compounds the problem noted above where copy and paste does not produce two identical instances of the object. I don't know if there's any way to edit e.g. the id attribute of an instance of an element in Contribute.