Icon theme specification: Standardizing icon names

[Frans Englich]

On Monday 11 October 2004 19:02, Daniel Taylor wrote:
> On Oct 11, 2004, at 11:10, Owen Taylor wrote:
> > Some very quick comments. It's really great you are working on this.
> >
> > On Sat, 2004-10-09 at 21:50 +0000, Frans Englich wrote:
> >> Hello everyone,
> >>
> >> Attached is a patch which standardizes 1048 icon names, compiled from
> >> the
> >> ~2050 icons which KDE and GNOME in all houses. While that sounds like
> >> a lot,
> >> and bizarre for that matter too, the important question is where this
> >> is
> >> heading, what we want to achieve, and why.
> >
> > Does it make sense to standardize this many icons? Should we try to
> > standardize a smaller subset that really obviously make sense ...
> > creating an icon theme with 1048 icons is pretty prohibitive.
>
> I think it does. One of the most annoying things while creating Lila
> was that there is no authoritative listing of icon names. We had to
> scrounge the various themes for possible names, and this is a real
> blocker for anyone wanting to get into theme creation.
>
> When we are talking about standardizing these icons, are we talking
> about making them mandatory, or would they fall back to the "default"
> theme if not found in the currently loaded one? If they aren't
> mandatory, then I think it's fine. You start with the most obvious ones
> and slowly fill in the blanks, until you have a full theme.

A theme fallbacks to the theme it inherits(etcetera, until hicolor is reached, 
which is the "base/super" theme). So GNOME look-a-like themes would probably 
inherit from gnome's theme(and hence have it as a dependency), and others on 
crystalsvg. The hardcore ones would go directly on hicolor. 

It's a quite efficient way of bootstrapping icon themes. For example, KDE 
could inherit gnome's theme to cover icons it doesn't have, in order to 
quickly ensure compatibility for non-KDE apps, and go back to hicolor when 
suitable(GNOME could do the same).

Regarding the icon count; _very_ many icons can be covered by using a "pseudo 
icon" mechanism, mapping many icon names to one icon.


Cheers,

		Frans