Comments on: Take that, Descartes

By: Rob

Rob — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 16:32:44 +0000

Thomas: not quite, but you can preview themes in Firefox or any other (CSS compliant) browser.

For positioning elements so they “stick” to an edge look at the “float” property: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/visuren.html#floats

By: Thomas Thurman

Thomas Thurman — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 15:04:39 +0000

@Rob:

Are you saying then that we will have to use a custom editor rather than Inkscape or something?

How will using CSS help us position, say, the blocky graphic to the right of the titlebar text in Crux?

By: Rob

Rob — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 14:21:37 +0000

Or use SVG for the graphics, and CSS to apply them without having to resort to hacks like the ones you describe. Works pretty well for the CSS engine: http://www.gnome.org/~robsta/gtk-css-engine/screenshots/15-single-canvas.png (work in progress)

By: Thomas Thurman

Thomas Thurman — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 00:34:03 +0000

I think there’s still the problem of how we represent relative coordinates in an SVG editor which only knows about absolute coordinates, though. Perhaps we could have special ids or id prefixes to indicate which element an element was positioned with respect to.

By: Thomas Thurman

Thomas Thurman — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 00:23:41 +0000

@Andrew Aylett:
I like that idea very much. *wanders off to think about it*

By: Andrew Aylett

Andrew Aylett — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 00:03:53 +0000

Another option for you, which vaguely resembles your option number two: Put the theme in a file which is valid SVG, then use a theme-provided XSLT, with appropriate parameters for the real window and theme information, to transform the SVG into what gets displayed.

You could probably standardise appropriate attributes to the SVG to let most themes use a standard XSLT.