So the styling stuff works well with our buttons and labels and things like 
that. I said I would look into Dojo and that is a bit more complicated.

Dojo widgets already have their own classnames. Some of these get pretty 
specific, for example changing the left and right border images on a tab in a 
tab container. I don't think it is worth the time and effort to try to rename 
these classes or change the scheme around. So when we make a tabPane we can 
give a class "xapTabPane" but it will also have a bunch of dojo classes on it.

One annoying thing about this is that there is no unified stylesheet for the 
dojo stuff, to figure out what each class is you have to experiment and look at 
each individual template file for each widget.

It is also going to be difficult to do something like have a different color 
when you roll over a tab, but no harder than it is to do in dojo normally.

Messing with the Dojo toolkit widgets a lot is probably not something we want 
to do, especially given that .4 has come out and we will want to upgrade to 
that (and beyond) at some point. My personal opinion is that in the long run it 
would be better to simply not use the Dojo widgets. They don't play well with 
other components and have some issues in general. (Touchy about size, image 
based looks that are hard to customize, etc) The base classes and general 
strategy for creating widgets is excellent but the end-user widgets themselves 
are merely average. (Again my opinion)

 

So the bottom line is that the states along with the formula based names are 
working well for components that we have mostly implemented, but not so well 
for components derived heavily from dojo widgets including window, tabPane, 
splitPane and menu stuff.

 

One thing we may want to do is pull the dojo classes out of the individual 
template CSS files that are most useful to end users and stick them in our 
general stylesheet, along with some different defaults possibly.

 

James Margaris

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