Monolithic spaces and D-spaces revisited

We introduce the classes of monotonically monolithic and strongly monotonically monolithic spaces. They turn out to be reasonably large and with some nice categorical properties. We prove, in particular, that any strongly monotonically monolithic countably compact space is metrizable and any monotonically monolithic space is a hereditary D-space. We show that some classes of monolithic spaces which were earlier proved to be contained in the class of D-spaces are monotonically monolithic. In particular, Cp(X) is monotonically monolithic for any Lindelöf Σ-space X. This gives a broader view of the results of Buzyakova and Gruenhage on hereditary D-property in function spaces.