Re: Color independent themes

[James Henstridge <james jamesh id au>]

Jason J. Herne wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I'm not a developer, just thought I would bounce this idea of off people
>on the list.  If this type of posting is frowned upon please let me know
>and I'll avoid it in the future.
>
>I am very much an eye candy person and as a long time Gnome user, I've
>always been very pleased with the amount of freedom available to
>customize my user interface.  However, one thing I've never understood
>was why every single theme that is provided is only available in a
>single color.  If the author of a theme wants to provide a second color
>scheme he/she needs to create a whole new theme package.
>
>Now, I may not understand everything to due with themes, but wouldn't
>it be relatively easy to create themes that allow the user to change the
>color scheme?  The theme author would simply define a set number of
>"colors" (with default RGB values) and name them something like
>"WINDOW_BORDER_GRADIENT_A" and "WINDOW_BORDER_GRADIENT_B" and then if
>you want your window border to fade from blue to blank instead of red to
>black, you would simply edit the RGB values of the colors on a nice GUI
>form, part of the Gnome theme manager.  A side effect of this may be
>that graphics created for themes should be grayscale?  Just some
>thoughts... let me know what you think.  
>
>Thanks for all the great work you guys do on Gnome!!
>
Something like this was discussed on gtk-devel-list back in June:

    http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2005-June/msg00028.html

With named colours and ways to base one colour on another existing one,
it is a lot easier to develop a theme that can have its colours customised.

James.