Re: Stock items (button images / menu images etc)

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

hi;

On 13 December 2013 08:15, John Emmas <john creativepost co uk> wrote:
> On 12 Dec 2013, at 20:31, Luis Matos wrote:
>
> > Just a rain check,
> >
> > In the future, images are not shipped in file (file.svg/file.png) but
> > still included in gtk (library)? Or not shipped at all?

GTK 3.x still ships icons for GtkStock identifiers, and will continue
to do so until GtkStock is removed, in the next API/ABI break.

it is strongly recommended *not* to use stock icons, but to use named
icons from the icon theme instead: those icons are actively
maintained, they have proper names, and allow fallback through
specificity, e.g. if the application requests the icon named
`foo-bar-baz` and it is not found, `foo-bar` and `foo` will also be
checked. the icon naming specification is a freedesktop.org
specification available here:
http://standards.freedesktop.org/icon-naming-spec/icon-naming-spec-latest.html

> Two more questions if I may....
>
> 1)  What are the ".svg" files?  I noticed them during my testing but I didn't manage to figure out what 
> they're used for.

SVG is scalable vector graphics, a vector graphics file format:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Vector_Graphics

inside icon themes SVG is used for scalable icons and, more recently,
for symbolic icons that are meant to be colourised parametrically
(e.g. signal strength and battery charge indicators).

> 2)  Why deprecate images for buttons and menus anyway?  They seem to be widely supported by OS's and other 
> programs / frameworks.  What's the rationale for deprecating them in gtk+?

images and buttons inside menus have not been deprecated: you can
still pack GtkImage widgets in buttons and menus, since both are
GtkContainers. it's pretty easy to do both programmatically and
through GtkBuilder (especially with the new builder templates).

what has been deprecated (in GTK 3.x) are:

  • stock icons, because they don't conform to the icon naming
specification, and because they conflate both labels and images in
weird ways. the thread on gtk-devel-list is available here:
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2013-July/msg00000.html
  • the gtk-button-images and gtk-menu-images GtkSettings, because
they clobber the desired UI of the application developers and
designers through a toolkit-wide setting.

as per usual with the G* stack, deprecation does not mean removal
until the next ABI break. in this case, GTK+ 4.0, which is currently
not planned to happen soon, and in any case will be (like any other
ABI/API break) parallel installable.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name
B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi/