Yeah, so fair questions... ...and my list here definitely remains an ask, not a tell.
What I mean by device friendly, is that a font can scale in size, up or down, to fit into a variety of screen sizes in a way that an image does not. Additionally, a font can take advantage of your phone or pad's anti-aliasing to get that full sub-pixel clarity out of your Retina display. And in general, a phone's cache space and browsing bandwidth are going to be more variable and limited, so reducing download size and number of requests is particularly helpful for less powerful devices. ...granted phones are getting better and better, but when would you ever want a page to load more slowly, even as that margin of difference goes down? Here is an article that lays out the main arguments for why font icons are good: http://css-tricks.com/html-for-icon-font-usage/ My summary and Jenkins specific thoughts are these.... 1) Number and size of server requests, in a bare-bones Jenkins install I count 15 server requests for icons, that may not seem like a ridiculous number of additional requests, but it is more than an order of magnitude more requests than are necessary. 2) Vector based imagery is easier to deal with for page design and readability 3) Fonts are easily programmatically and CSS manipulatable to reflect states and status in a way that images are not 4) Using fonts provides a convenient way to package a base-pack of icons plugin authors can easily borrow from 5) The simplification forced by the abstraction into a single color makes creation of new and matching icons a little easier 6) At the moment, anyway, they are on-trend, or at least have a bit more modern vibe than the Tango Feet icon pack, currently in use I think you are right, the big down-side is the lack of multiple colors and the relative ease of creating 1-off custom icons as a PNG. It is hard to beat the tried-and-true bitmap for whipping up that 1 button you need right this second. If we were to embrace font-based icons, we would definitely need to handle backwards compatibility, so my hope would be that if a community member wanted to use PNGs, they still could. Conceivably, by swapping CSS files, they could swap fonts for PNGs on a global basis, if that was the users preference. On Fri, Jun 20, 2014 at 11:54 AM, Daniel Beck <[email protected]> wrote: > > 4) Adopt a new icon library, likely based on a glyph-font library like > Font-Awesome to enhance performance and device friendliness > > What exactly is the problem with normal icons? Jenkins isn't dial-up > friendly anyway, so optimizing the first-time loading of 5 icons won't make > a difference. What specifically does 'device friendliness' refer to? > > Font-Awesome seems to be pretty small and doesn't have icons with > "modifiers" (e.g. New Item's star, Build History's pencil). Isn't this > going to be a problem? > > Does this mean single color icons instead of properly colored icons? Will > these be all the same color, or color still be used to distinguish the > icons? > > There should be a migration strategy for plugins that makes old plugins > not look out of place (and new plugins on then-current LTS installs). I > think I've mentioned it before, but having to install the latest & > frequently-not-greatest because plugins raise their minimum version to get > new _icons_ wouldn't a good solution. > > ----- > > Icon-related issue that could be cleaned up while this is being worked on: > - "Manage Jenkins » Script Console", "Build History", "(Build) » Changes", > and "(Build) » Edit Build Information" use the same icon > - as do "Manage Jenkins » CLI", "Console Output", and "(Node) » Script > Console" > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the > Google Groups "Jenkins Developers" group. > To unsubscribe from this topic, visit > https://groups.google.com/d/topic/jenkinsci-dev/zDaX4yiWLLw/unsubscribe. > To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Jenkins Developers" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
