Universal themes: a proposal

[François Revol]

Le Sat, 10 Apr 2010 16:42:32 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot a écrit :
> Le samedi 10 avril 2010 à 16:44 +0200, François Revol a écrit :
> 
> > An alternative to embedding the files would be to give urls to 
> > locate 
> > them.
> > CSS does have a provision for this also (though IIRC it's an M$ 
> > extension).
> 
> Even discarting the legal implications, this is bad too, as people 
> tend
> to dump a file on a web server and forget it, so after a while you're
> hardcoding an old font file in your theme, even though a newer 
> (fixed)
> version may be present on system (we see it a lot with pre-fontconfig
> apps: to workaround the lack of a good system-wide font management
> layer, they bundled font files with the source code. Looking at new
> versions of those apps you find the code had been regularly updated 
> but
> the font files are still a snapshot of whatever fonts were popular 
> when
> the app was initially released, with the bugs that existed at that 
> time,
> even though they've been updated many times over by the font upstream
> since).

Again, it makes sense for OSes that do have centralized package 
management...

> Unless you intend to rewrite a complete font management layer, it is
> much better not to try to shortcut the existing one, and let it 
> manage
> all font files. Users really do not like it when the same font is not
> rendered the same way in various parts of the screen, because some 
> parts
> use the system-wide font & settings, and others some private
> app-specific font version or config.

Remember we are talking about Themes, which are supposed to be applied 
to the whole desktop itself (mostly) (I hate skinned apps cause the 
break GUI consistency, but desktop themes are not the same).
So the font should stay consistent, at least for the desktop it is 
applied to.

François.