[xwiki-devs] [Discussion] About Icon Themes

Hi. In XWiki 6.2, we have introduced the Icon Theme Application [1]. The idea was to be able to use Font Awesome in the Applications Panel without breaking all extensions. So we have a mapping between silk icons (that the extensions used until now) and the font awesome equivalents [2]. But, of course, the mapping is currently incomplete. For 2 reasons: 1/ It takes time to make it perfect (so feel free to improve it, directly on the wiki page! [2]) 2/ Some silk icons have no equivalent. Where a silk equivalent is missing, the Icon Theme Application automatically failbacks to the Silk icon, so something appears. Of course, it does not look very good when all icons are monochromatic except only one [3]. When there is no equivalent, we could have a strategy to not failback on Silk but instead using the most similar icon in Font Awesome. For example http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/resources/icons/silk/flag_blue.png and http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/resources/icons/silk/flag_green.png can both be mapped to http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/icon/flag/ . But it would be problem if an extension use both icons to represent 2 different actions. In my opinion, we should not do this and let the failback-process happens. But actually, having this mapping should be only used for backward compatibility. What I want to propose is about the future. We should not use the silk icons anymore with the hope that it will be correctly mapped in other icon themes. What I want to create, is our own list of icons. The XWiki icon set. But I am not talking about drawing new icons. I am talking about create an official mapping for the icons we support and that have a mapping in all existing icon themes. For example, I have create the "wiki" icon, which is mapped to http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/resources/icons/silk/world.png in silk and on http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/icon/globe/ in font-awesome. I believe we need to create that list and create a documentation about it somewhere (maybe in a page integrated in XE, but at least on the extension page). So when a user create an application, she no longer chose an icon from the Silk collection but from our own list. If we agree on that principle, we also need to agree on a convention about the name of our icons. I propose: 'some-name' which means everything in lower case and words separated by '-'. I hope you'll like the idea. Thanks, [1] http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Icon+Theme+Application (The Icon Theme Application) [2] http://design.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Proposal/IconSet (The mapping) [3] http://tof.canardpc.com/view/debc907e-d1ee-4e01-baff-dc740801e68d.jpg (Problem) -- Guillaume Delhumeau (gdelhumeau(a)xwiki.com) Research & Development Engineer at XWiki SAS Committer on the XWiki.org project