Re: Application specific themable icons

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Fri, 2006-12-15 at 11:49 +0100, Luca Ferretti wrote:
> Here [1] is a page about application specific themable icons (named
> icons installed by application outside the system-wide hicolor
> directory).
> 
> Feel free to edit (by now it's just a draf), implement suggested changes
> in your applications and add new subpages listing icons installed by
> your application[2] (useful for theme maker people).
> 
> Thanks to Rodney Dawes for the original idea[3].
> 
> [1] http://live.gnome.org/ThemableAppIcons
> [2] http://live.gnome.org/ThemableAppIcons/EpiphanySpecificIcons
> [3] http://wayofthemonkey.com/index.php?date=2006-11-15&month=11&year=2006

I participated a bit in some of the xdg-list discussions about
doing this, and I was a big proponent of having the application
theme directory contain directories for each theme, rather than
just have a single set of fallback icons.  For me, the big reason
was that applications could provide accessibility versions of all
their custom icons.

What I also wanted was a standard "fallback" theme for each of
our accessibility themes, much like hicolor is a fallback for
other themes.  That is, our actual high contrast theme would
continue to be HighContrast, but it would inherit from some
other theme, like hicontrast.  That would, in turn, inherit
from hicolor.  Applications could then install high contrast
versions of all their custom icons in hicontrast.

Perhaps Rodney knows if there was any further discussion about
this.  It would certainly be nice for applications to be able
to provide for accessibility needs without being tied to one
desktop.  And the current trend of having our accessibility
themes try to provide everything for every application just
doesn't scale.

--
Shaun