Idea to add media type for icons

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

When we tell users to click on an icon, I think it's best
to show the icon in the help, rather than give a textual
description of it.

This means we end up shipping copies of icons with our
help.  Madness ensues.

So I was thinking about adding a media type for icons
from the icon theme.  Something like this:

<media type="icon" width="16" src="camera-web"/>

The width (or height) attribute would specify the icon
size, and the src attribute would specify the icon name.
We can make this work pretty easily in Yelp.

For the web, it's another story.  One option, of course,
is to use fallbacks.

<media type="icon" width="16" src="camera-web">
<media type="image" mime="image/png"
src="figures/camera-web.png"/></media>

But that gets us right back to shipping all the icons
alongside the help.  I'm sure I could get gnome-doc-tool
to massage the documents, which is great for people who
use that to make standalone web documents.

But then there's build systems built off the stylesheets
that don't use gnome-doc-tool, like for library.  They'd
need special magic themselves.  Maybe I could provide a
preprocessor they could use.

There's definitely some kinks here that would have to
be worked out to make this happen.  I'm not proposing
it as 1.0 material, but it's something I'd like to at
least think about for 1.2.

--
Shaun