Re: Theming API hackfest: last call

[Christian Dywan <christian imendio com>]

Am Mon, 13 Oct 2008 12:55:08 +0200
schrieb "Robert Staudinger" <robert staudinger gmail com>:

> On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 3:36 AM, Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org>
> wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
> > Hi Rob,
> >
> > I got to know about work you are doing by crossing over your fd.o
> > account request.  I thought to myself: "wow, this is so cool... why
> > didn't I hear about this stuff before?"  I think a good number of
> > GNOME/GTK+ developers are in that boat too.  So, why don't you tell
> > us some more about what you've been doing and what your future
> > plans are?  Here on the list I mean.
>
> [...]
>
> It soon became apparent that CSS drawing capability wrapped into a
> simple API might be of use for other cairo-based applications as well,
> so with some support from Carl Worth I spun that part off to fd.o
> after the recent 0.2 release. Currently I'm focusing on the libccss
> API, feedback from Intel's Robert Bragg and Thomas Wood has been very
> valuable. After that I'll try to focus on the engine again, mostly the
> support for composite widgets mentioned above.
> 
> I'll also be looking into setting style parameters from CSS, probably
> something like "GtkButton { gtk: child-displacement-x(1); }" or
> "GtkButton { gtk-child-displacement-x: 1; }".
> 
> Finally, regarding the SVG theming efforts that are floating around
> [2, 3], I think that CSS and SVG are mostly orthogonal rather than
> competing with each other. SVG is great for graphics, and CSS is made
> for things like expressing that the GtkButton instance inside a
> GtkTreeView should be drawn as a column header.

I would think, the fact that you are actually trying to preseve
oddities like the GtkTreeView/ GtkButton relation, leaves a bit of a
bad aftertaste. I like the CSS idea, because the most of the syntax is
pretty intuitive - to someone who knows CSS anyway. But I think the
goal should - imho - involve leaving behind those tricks, whatever the
best approach may be.

Just my two pfennig,
    Christian