Comments on: Policy about theme versions

By: Squib of the day: gentle fade - …for the adult in you

Squib of the day: gentle fade - …for the adult in you — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 01:42:31 +0000

[...] press them– should fade in from the non-prelit state. This was originally said to require a change to the theme format, but in fact I can’t see that it does: any theme which defines a prelit state for buttons can [...]

By: Squib of the day: named colours - …for the adult in you

Squib of the day: named colours - …for the adult in you — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 01:45:06 +0000

[...] Because this requires a change to the theme format, it must be committed first on a branch. [...]

By: Squib of the day: Special frame style for warning dialogues - …for the adult in you

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 00:03:11 +0000

[...] Because this requires a change to the theme format, it must be committed first on a branch. [...]

By: Squib of the day: line weight - …for the adult in you

Squib of the day: line weight - …for the adult in you — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 00:02:58 +0000

[...] Since this is a change to the format, it must appear first on a branch. This bug actually predates v2, but wasn’t included in that version because it wasn’t marked as blocking the v2 tracker bug. [...]

By: Cameron McCormack

Cameron McCormack — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 05:51:33 +0000

Someone (can’t remmeber who) was discussing the use of SVG for themes in Metacity on irc://irc.freenode.net/svg with me recently. As a result I added a requirement to the “SVG Layout: Use Cases and Requirements” document:

http://dev.w3.org/SVG/modules/layout/publish/SVGLayoutReqs.html#template

which will be published as a first draft soon. We (the SVG Working Group) discussed this particular requirement at our recent face-to-face meeting a couple of weeks ago, and there wasn’t consensus on having this as a strict requirement for our Layout module. Instead it’s going to be a “maybe” requirement (i.e., if we can support it easily, we will, but it won’t have a big influence on the design of the upcoming SVG layout capabilities). However, the use of the other SVG layout features (such as layout containers) that are proposed, in conjunction with some custom templating mechanism, could well be sufficient for your needs.

By: Screwtape

Screwtape — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 05:25:27 +0000

I think the problem with v2 themes is that the add a few convenient features (constants and variable-radius borders), but require a lot of extra boilerplate (all those extra title-bar buttons). Of course, another issue is that a large number of themes don’t need anything more than what the v1 format provides.

A potential wish-list item for the v3 theme format would be to take a leaf out of the HTML/CSS book: have built-in defaults for everything, allow the theme author to override some of them, and have a well-documented system for how overrides cascade to affect other things. For example, if I only define a normal window style, it’s a good guess I want every kind of window to use it. If I define “normal” and “dialog” styles, it’s more likely that “shaded” and “maximized” windows should follow the “normal” style, but “modal_dialog” should follow “dialog”.

This sort of cascade is what I was getting at with the complicated list in bug 565913 -