Re: Notes and thoughts on the GTK+ meeting at GUADEC

[Thomas Wood <thos gnome org>]

On Thu, 2009-08-20 at 11:38 +0200, Robert Staudinger wrote:
> (3) Swap GdkWindow for cairo_t in gtk_paint_*() engines would continue
> to work except having to use cairo_t instead of GdkWindow.

This is what I have a partial patch for in bugzilla¹. However, this is
something of a monumental task, since it requires not only replacing
every single gtk_paint* call in GTK+, but also adding the setup of the
cairo context around every where paint calls are used.

In the end I decided my time was better spent starting a new independent
API that could be migrated too more gradually.

> Now, back to reality, it seems that the gtk3 theming-related efforts
> (GtkStyleContext/Monet/css-engine,ccss) are not very aligned yet.

Well, I am more than open to using css as the "theming" mechanism in
Monet, but I do have some reservations about its suitability without any
customisation. CSS falls short in a number of places when it comes to
toolkit styling. However, it also has a number of very positive design
aspects, so I think we could incorporate those to create our own,
css-like theme mechanism.

One thing I found interesting when listening to how GNUStep had
approached adding a theme/style mechanism to their toolkit was the
absolute insistence on a GUI for editing the themes. It was very
important to them that this was built at the same time as the new API
was added. If there are good GUI tools for creating themes, the actual
data format becomes less import.

Regards,

Thomas


¹ http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=576988