Proposal: Cairo-based, cross-desktop/toolkit theme engine API.

[Jakob Petsovits]

On Thursday, 17. April 2008, 洪任諭 wrote:
> Hi all,
> For a long time, It's quite annoying that gtk+ applications always
> look like alien under KDE, and vice versa. The gtk+-qt theme engine
> "partially" solve this, but this is not enough.
[snip]
> We already have a nice croass-toolkit/cross-platform drawing API - Cairo.
> So, why not create a new set of theming API based on Cairo?
[snip]
> What do you think?

I just want to note that Qt doesn't use Cairo but its own graphics engine,
so this will introduce new dependencies for KDE themes (in addition to the 
indirection which is likely to come with non-native code and feature 
omissions compared to QStyle).

So if you want this to be a success that is actually used cross-desktop, you 
better make sure to talk to the responsible KDE people before and while 
implementing this. That, or you introduce an intermediary custom theme for 
both Qt and Gtk+ which is an API in itself and provides the theming 
capabilities for both toolkits alike.

Yay for common APIs and abstraction, just make sure that it doesn't become 
a "standard" which will only be used by GNOME in the end.

Cheers,
  Jakob