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

[Joe Mason]

On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 9:06 AM, 洪任諭 <pcman.tw at gmail.com> wrote:
>  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?

As mentioned in another thread, this exists already -
http://www.metatheme.org.  I just tried it out and it basically works,
but it still has a lot of rough edges and development's been stagnant
since 2005.

I'm really skeptical that introducing Yet Another Theming API will
help anything, though.  Trying to fix problems with existing
incompatible standards by adding a new standard just means there's now
another standard for people to target.  You'd just get a small handful
of "metathemes" that work on both KDE and Gnome, but the cast majority
of themes already written will still only target one platform.

I'd rather see a theme bridge - metatheme already has a backend that
loads MSSTYLE themes, so it could also add a backend for Qt and Gtk+
themes (and Enlightenment themes and anything else people are
interested in).  Then any theme could be plugged into any toolkit that
supports metatheme.

Unfortunately, the current metatheme architecture isn't set up to
allow this very well, but it might still be a good base.

Joe