Re: Gnome 3 Extensions/Themes Website?

["Jasper St. Pierre" <jstpierre mecheye net>]

On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 4:50 PM, Dotan Cohen <dotancohen gmail com> wrote:

On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 12:32, Jasper St. Pierre <jstpierre mecheye net> wrote:
> Welp, I was going to have a thread announcing my work on this, but I guess
> I'll just hijack this one.
>
> First, one quick point out of the way: I don't think we need to separate
> between themes and extensions. Going forward, I think that the user-theme
> extension will die.
>

I hope not. Themes alter the presentation of an application,
extensions add functionality. That is an important distinction, in
fact technologies such as CSS have been invented to create this
distinction where it once did not exist (SGML, HTML).

OK, then we can axiomatically put extensions into two categories: themes and functional, based on the existence of scripting.

But still, with new code such as the shell, the CSS support isn't as good as browsers so there may be quirks or workarounds that need code.

I thought about ensuring that extensions "marked as themes" cannot have any code at all, but that unfortunately excluded the use cases above.
 

What benefit do you envision by removing this distinction? 

I want to reduce the amount of support code required to support both themes and extensions.

From a user's perspective, installing both should be one button to click. Changing themes may be different than enabling and disabling extensions, but the UI to change themes can just do some trickery and enable/disable the correct extensions under the hood.
 

--
Dotan Cohen

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