Re: Moving towards actually using icon-naming-spec names

[Rodney Dawes <dobey novell com>]

On Mon, 2007-02-12 at 22:04 -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> On 2/12/07, Rodney Dawes <dobey novell com> wrote:
> > On Fri, 2007-02-09 at 12:39 -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> > > I don't see much progress with moving towards actual use of the icon naming spec
> > > yet. Bug 396994 has a patch to make the .directory files in gnome-menus use
> > > spec-compliant names where applicable. I think we should do that for 2.18.
> > >
> > > While doing the patch, I noticed that the icon naming spec does not list
> > > preferences
> >
> > This is what "preferences-desktop" is for. At least, based on the
> > current organization of things in GNOME.
> >
> > > settings (for the Administration menu)
> >
> > This is what "preferences-system" is for.
> >
> 
> 
> Reality doesn't follow you here; in the current gnome-menus directory files,
> preferences-desktop is used for the "Preferences>Look and Feel" submenu
> and preferences-system is used for the "Preferences>System" submenu.
> It might have helped to go with the established terminology of
> preferences vs settings...

Reality follows this fine. The names were based on existing
implementations, and the goal of separating system and user preferences.
Trying to differentiate them by using synonyms doesn't make sense. In
the end "preferences" and "settings" mean the same thing to the user. In
GNOME the distinction that is attempted, is that of requiring root or
not, which from a usability perspective, is a horrible distinction to
try and make.

> > > documentation
> >
> > Where does "documentation" appear in the menu system at all? And what,
> > if anything, appears under it? We already have "Help" on the menu, and
> > it gets the "help-browser" icon.
> 
> We have a Documentation submenu below Preferences and Administration
> in RHEL. It shows, well, documentation.

RHEL != { GNOME, KDE }. We have a documentation browsing system already.
Both desktops have documentation systems already. And they are both
opened via the "Help" item in the main menu. The spec is based on that
fact. If RHEL is going to add custom menus to their menu system, then
the can try to come up with icons in their own themes to satisfy their
needs. The spec is not meant to provide icons for RHEL, SUSE, Gentoo, or
whatever other favorite distribution anyone wants icons for.

> > > as standard categories. Maybe preferences and applications are implied by
> > > the fallback-to-generic names scheme in the spec, but they should probably
> > > be listed explicitly, since e.g. the gnome icon theme is missing them.
> >
> > They are not implied by the fallback, nor should they be listed
> > explicitly.
> 
> Please explain how they are not implied by the fallback ? Does the
> fallback only work for certain icon names ? If so, which ones ?
> Anyway, as things stand, the icon naming spec does not currently
> provide enough names to cover the preferences/administration menus and
> their submenus.

The Spec is meant to be the absolute minimum. Icon names extending upon
these names, are meant to fall back to these names, and (fully)
compliant themes are to provide these names at a minimum. Having stuff
fall back from media-{optical,flash,...} to media, wouldn't make sense
for example. What exactly would "media" be. What exactly are
"applications" or "preferences". Having icons for concepts that are so
vague and abstract, doesn't make sense.


-- dobey