I've posted a very early proposal to
http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Chandler/VisualStyle - I
probably won't add anything more the proposal until after 0.5, but feel
free to add comments at the end of it.
Alec
Alec Flett wrote:
Sounds like at this point this is water
under the bridge, though :)
For now, at least.
Exactly - for now. I actually had CSS in mind when I gave my earlier
proposal - it was kind of a backwards CSS "class" model. I don't see
any need to shoehorn actual CSS into this, but instead we should
leverage the tools we have to get the most gain with as little work as
possible. I'm not sure CSS will ever be completely appropriate for
chandler, but even if we can match some of the selector model, people
will be able to adapt their understanding of rule matches and so forth.
I've thought about this a bit further and I think we can accomplish
something very similar to id/class matching like CSS by making use of
some of chandler's Query infrastructure, and some of the bidirectional
stuff, simplier than my earlier proposal.
Specifically:
<Style>
<!-- almost identical to CSS's #id selector, applying to a specific
block -->
<applyToBlock itemref="somedoc:SomeSpecificBlock">
<StyleRule.../>
</Style>
and
<Style>
<!-- almost identical to CSS's .class selector, applying to a set
of blocks -->
<applyToBlocks rule="for i in ... where
someattribute='somevalue'"/>
<StyleRule.../>
</Style>
If down the line someone wanted to adapt this stuff to read rules from
CSS and store them in the repository in the same way they would if they
came in from parcel.xml, more power to them! The serialization format
doesn't matter as long as we're consistent about how we store it in the
repository.
Alec
But, per Alec, I would like to see the
visual appearance of Chandler in
its current state cleaned up as long as it doesn't introduce material
delays.
I don't think switching to a different style description language would
provide any visual cleaning in the short term. Using CSS instead of a
custom style language is more of a platform/interop issue. If you tell
a web designer (or a designer familiar with Mozilla) they should do
styling using CSS, it should be easy for them to theme Chandler or
their
favorite parcel.
Designers certainly can learn a new language,
I think the pool of people
who'll do this is smaller than the pool who would hack at something
that
used CSS.
On the other hand, I really don't think Chandler wants to reimplement
XUL, or make CPIA look like DOM. Many facets of CSS just won't apply
to
Chandler, ever. It's entirely possible a partial implementation of CSS
might be more frustrating to web developers than learning a new style
language!
It's not clear to me how much trying to do a limited amount of styling
using CSS would delay, say, 0.6. I suspect it would slow things down a
fair bit. However, this might be one of those things that will slow us
down more the longer we wait to implement it.
Sincerely,
Jeffrey
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