Re: Theme Set, part two

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

On Fri, 2002-08-30 at 08:11, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> On 29 Aug 2002, Seth Nickell wrote:
> 
> > > I certainly don't think that the 'Desktop Theme Set' facility should
> > > allow the user to select things that would not be available via the
> > > separate capplets.  Therefore the theme sets should be as inclusive as
> > > possible in order to be useful, and _must_ be so if they are to meet
> > > accessibility needs.  I agree with you that creators of new visual
> > > "looks" will often want to specify their favorite fonts as part of the
> > > "Theme Set", I don't see why we should make that impossible or even
> > > difficult.  As I said, users are still free to mix-and-match via the
> > > separate capplets.
> > 
> > Because when authors change the font, they will almost always choose
> > unusable fonts; there's much less incentive to touch the font if you're
> > going to leave it with a boring but readable font. Themes are currently
> > designed primarily with an interest in visual appearance. This is not
> > *so* bad for controls and window borders, but goes south really quickly
> > for text usability (fonts). And we don't want users to have to do two
> > settings changes per settings change. That's my whole point here Bill!
> > Centralising all these things *increases* expected number of "clicks"
> > and/or expected number of preference pages that will need to be opened.
> 
> I *completely* agree with this. And additionally, if we ever get a set of 
> actually good fonts I don't want this wasted by people downloading themes 
> and getting one of our old crap fonts back. There is also the issue that 
> the font specified in the theme may not exist on the users system (and due 
> to copyright issues can't be put in the themeball) so some possibly ugly 
> fallbacks will be used ("Sans" for everything i suppose).

I think we can solve fallback-behavior problems (for instance, if the
specified font does not exist, *don't change the font* ;-).  I am not
saying we should encourage inclusion of font-face in the theme as matter
or policy, only that we need to allow it.

I don't agree with the number-of-clicks argument, keeping Fonts out of
Theme Set just decreases the number for some use cases at the expense of
others.

-Bill

> -- 
> =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
>  Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
>                    alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
> He's a sword-wielding drug-addicted paranormal investigator on the hunt for 
> the last specimen of a great and near-mythical creature. She's a strong-willed 
> blonde queen of the dead from beyond the grave. They fight crime! 
>