1 Oct
2014
1 Oct
'14
5 p.m.
On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 4:59 PM, Guillaume "Louis-Marie" Delhumeau <
gdelhumeau(a)xwiki.com> wrote:
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.
An improvement to this would be to provide also a color in the mapping.
Being a font icon set, from CSS is very easy to give a blue or a green
color to the icon (if as you said the developer needed the color
difference).
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.
IMO we really need this list because without it I don't think we can create
an easy UI that can change the icon for the IconThemes.
Just like we have specific variables in ColorThemes, the same we will have
a finit list of standard icons that we use across the wiki (and as you said
that we support).
Related to this topic I started a very very long time a go a study of icons
used inside XWiki, you can see some informations here
http://design.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Standards/Icons
According to the study and regarding the convention we will need something
like:
A. 'entity'
B. 'action'
C. 'entity-action'
D. 'entity-subtype'
... ?
Example:
A. 'wiki', 'space, 'page', 'attachment', 'comment',
etc.
B. 'add/create', 'delete/remove', 'edit', 'copy', etc.
C. 'comment-add', 'page-add', 'user-delete', etc.
D. 'arrow-down', 'user-disabled', 'page-zip', etc.
Maybe we should add also a prefix, like 'icon' or 'theme-icon' if we
think
in the future we might have something like 'theme-{icon|color|etc.}'
although might be longer.
Thanks,
Caty
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
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