Re: High Contrast Icons

[Rodney Dawes <dobey novell com>]

On Tue, 2005-11-22 at 13:42 -0600, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-11-21 at 22:40 +0000, Thomas Wood wrote:
> 
> > If an application calls itself "accessible", having high contrast icons 
> > should be one of the requirements. Applications are allowed to install 
> > icons into the hicolor theme; if we're really taking accessibility 
> > seriously, then high contrast themes should have a similar status to 
> > hicolor.
> 
> How do we keep applications from overwriting each other's icons?

Don't name your application the same as another application, and
namespace your icons appropriately? :) There is not really any good
answer to this I guess. The same problem has existed with hicolor for
as long as the Icon Theme Spec has been around. Applications should
ONLY be installing their APPLICATION icon to hicolor or high-contrast
though. Action, status, and other icons, should be part of the theme
for now. We really need to design a good method for doing fallback
themes and paths. The current API, in GTK+ at least, is not all that
great for doing it.

> Does this have anything to do with the relatively new icon naming spec?

One thing I hope to add to the Icon Naming spec soon, is a set of
guidelines for naming application icons, that will help to prevent
the possibility of conflicts with other app icons. Once the spec is
more filled out, and Tango and other themes implement the base icons,
we can start pushing more to get people to move to it. I've written up
a little crutch patch for libgnomeui to help us migrate a little easier,
that will be going into CVS soon. I'll also be working on patches for
other apps and libraries as well. It would be nice to have others
helping to get the spec implemented in gnome though. I don't really have
enough time to do it all by myself. :) Review and suggestions for the
spec are also quite welcome. Hopefully, I'll be able to write up specs
for deprecated icons, and extended icons for different purposes soon.
Once all this is a bit more final, we can start having reasonable sets
of icon themes whose completeness are actually defined by a document
which lists all these icons.

-- dobey