Re: High Contrast Icons

[Rodney Dawes <dobey novell com>]

On Wed, 2005-11-23 at 13:48 -0600, Shaun McCance wrote:
> Back on topic: Real applications in the wild are absolutely
> going to need to install some application-specific icons
> for various actions or data that are unique to those apps.
> Even if a sizable percentage of those icons are things we
> could manage to abstract into generic icons, third-party
> developers aren't going to wait around for new releases
> just so their applications can function.  It's great that
> we've finally managed to make progress on standard icon
> naming, and I applaud everybody who's been involved with
> that effort.  But it's important we have a recommendation
> for random application-specific icon names.

Then real applications shouuld install those icons into a private
data directory. There's no point in installing them into the theme
if other applications don't need them. We are trying to create a
very large list of icon names that should be used for specific purposes.
We are also trying to deprecate some icons, so that we can reduce the
number of icons in use throughout the desktop overall. The sheer number
of icons we have already, is quite overwhelming to both the user, and to
theme developers and artists.

Application specific things should go into application specific
directories. In that sense, what yelp is currently doing is the right
way to do it, if other help browsers aren't going to use them. App icons
though fall into two categories. There are icons for standard desktop
accessories and utilities. File manager, help browser, calculator,
terminal and a few others fall into this category. Then there are app
icons which should be branded. Things such as web browsers, mail,
calendar, and similar applications, fall into this category. While it
probably is not the case that another application will need to use an
app's icon as its own, it is the case that other applications will need
to display those icons. This is the reason for them being installed to
the hicolor theme. The Icon Theme spec is not particularly clear on this
subject, but it was designed around the need to have app icons work in
the menus properly on both desktops, without copying the icons to a
bunch of different places.

-- dobey