Re: Idea to add media type for icons

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Thu, 2009-09-03 at 07:47 +0200, Milo Casagrande wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> 2009/9/2 Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>:
> >
> > 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.
> 
> This would be awesome!
> 
> If it's going to be theme-related, do we have a fallback for themes
> that don't have a particular icon?

This shouldn't be a problem for any of the standard icons
in the icon naming specification.  We'd fall back to other
themes, just as the application does.

This does become a problem for application-specific icons.
Usually, these are installed in an application-specific
data directory, and the application itself appends this
directory to its icon search path.  Unless we can somehow
specify this directory in our help, we won't be able to
pick these up.

We could always build the page files from .page.in files,
and have media references like this:

<media type="image" mime="image/png"
src="file:///usr/share/empathy/icons/hicolor/16x16/status/empathy-available.png"/>

Of course, we could do that right now regardless of whether
we had an icon media type.  That also leaves us with the
problem of what library will do.

Lots to chew on.

--
Shaun