So, to give some positive input to this discussion, if gif, ani (or more esoteric formats like mng or apng) are not acceptable because they are not already supported by gnome and kde, how about making use of a mechanism already present in the icon theme spec, and define a set of extra keys for .icon files to indicate that a set of icons is meant to be used as an animation. The frames of the animation can then be stored as individual icons (and you don't have to explain why you put a 240x240 image in the 24x24 directory...). Going this route also allows to specify some extra parameters to ensure that you at least have the same feature set that gif animations had a long time ago, like per-frame durations, and maybe disposal modes.
In practise it could look like this: 24x24/animations contains gnome-spinner.icon gnome-spinner.png gnome-spinner1.png gnome-spinner2.png ... All frames are available as regular icons, the first frame under the same name as the animation. gnome-spinner.icon has entries like X-animation-sequence = gnome-spinner.png,gnome-spinner1.png,gnome-spinner2.png,... X-animation-delay = 100,100,100,200,... X-animation-loop = 5 I think a setup like this would do much less violence to the icon theme specification while maintaining the essential benefits of the all-frames-in-a-png hack: graceful degradation for animation-less environments, no new image formats required. Matthias _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
