Icon theme specification: Standardizing icon names

[Daniel Taylor]

This is great work! While I'm sure specifics will still have to be 
worked out, I'm glad to really see some major work being done to unify 
icon theming across the desktop. I hope this gets adopted by all the 
major players!

As an icon theme author (of the original Lila themes, of which there 
are themes for GNOME/KDE/XFCE, Firefox, and various other contributed 
themes) I can really see the usefullness of this. Managing all those 
different themes is a royal pain, and it's really just mostly renaming 
files and/or creating slightly different configuration files (like 
gtkrc).

We actually had the idea of creating a program to automatically convert 
themes, but never had a standard to write the themes for (that could 
then be used to generate all the different themes). There were also 
some problems with generating icons using emblem overlays (going from 
GNOME to KDE, for example), but svg-utils can do that now. Perhaps a 
program like that could still be useful (even if just to convert old 
themes to this new standard without any hassle)...

Some questions:

	-How do you propose to handle mimetypes? GNOME and KDE differ wildly 
on this front (The GNOME makes more sense to me).

	-Should mimetypes be handled with emblems?

	-It would be a good idea to get quite a lot of application icons in 
the "default" set, especially apps that most desktop configurations 
will have. Web browser, chat program, mail program, multimedia apps, 
office apps, development apps, etc come to mind. Are these going to be 
included in the spec?

	-Is it your stance that KDE (and other desktops) should adopt a 
GNOME-like emblem system (as in, would you make it the standard)? I 
believe this is a really useful feature.

I will be watching this project closely :-D
--
Daniel G. Taylor
http://programmer-art.org