> a) How can designers created named styles and add them to the application > easily?
I agree that this is a requirement. > b) How can I make styles automatically picked up if they are change? I'm not sure I would include this as a requirement. I know it is possible in CSS, but I have rarely used it in practice. It's a similar idea to replacing the entire L&F on the fly, and we don't support that either (we actually used to, but dropped it because it added needless complexity). > c) How can I apply styles without having the programmer do anything? This seems related to (a) and also seems like a valid requirement. > d) How can named styles build on each other? The union of all applicable > styles should be honored. This is the question of multiple styles. Not sure if I'd include it as a requirement, but it is a nice-to-have. > If a named style exists, you must use that > explicitly, but otherwise, how can we aggregate styles through the > parent-child relationship? Based on the work I have done over the past couple of days, I think this will be difficult to achieve (see my earlier email about construction order in BXML). I'm also not sure it offers enough value. Inheriting styles makes sense in CSS, because CSS is primarily used to style text (e.g. I want my <span> to inherit the same color and font as the <div> that contains it). Pivot's text classes (org.apache.pivot.wtk.text) also support style inheritance for this reason. However, as I mentioned earlier, components don't inherit styles because there is generally little or no overlap between ancestor styles and component styles. So, I would not include this as a requirement. IMO, a global set of named styles (a la CSS) would be sufficient. > e) How can an individual component indicate they don't want automatic > styling and turn everything off? Also not a requirement. If I create a class and assign that class to a component, the styles for that class should be applied to the component. > f) How can I add a style "key" but not change any pivot code? Not necessarily a requirement, but keeping changes to a minimum would be good. > g) Can I have a mechanism that I could change so that styles can be > specified in another syntax besides JSON? Since JSON is easier XML, maybe I > want a dynamic language data structure way of doing this. The most recently solution I proposed would support this.
