Re: High Contrast Icons

[Rodney Dawes <dobey novell com>]

On Tue, 2005-11-22 at 23:14 -0600, Shaun McCance wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-11-22 at 20:47 -0500, Rodney Dawes wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Then what's an application to do when it needs additional
> icons?  Yelp currently installs 10 images for admonitions
> and watermarks that can be themed.  And I intend to add
> more, whenever I get around to it.  All of the filenames
> start with the yelp- prefix, so they're relatively safe.
> But unless there's a good recommendation on how to name
> such things, problems are going to arise.
> 
> Note that Yelp currently doesn't install these into hicolor.
> Instead, it puts them into $(datadir)/yelp/icons and calls
> gtk_icon_theme_append_search_path.  And while that's fine
> for avoiding conflicts in hicolor, it doesn't help us when
> themes need to override the defaults, as our a11y themes
> certainly would want to.

It seems to me like these things would be useful not only to yelp, but
other desktops' help browsers as well. We should probably come up with a
common set of names if they belong in the icon theme, or a common help
documentation theming method. Or both. It would be very useful to have
a common method for theming the documentation through stylesheets. I
think the closest thing we have now, is to just patch the stylesheets in
the help browsers at build time.

-- dboey