Re: Re: =?iso-8859-1?Q?Re: Proposition for a Gorm feature Was: Gorm too complex ??=

[Fred Kiefer]

Helge Hess wrote:

> On Montag, Februar 11, 2002, at 07:37  Uhr, Nicola Pero wrote:
>
> > I suppose that when you create a window without a specified background
> > color/image, the theme default would be used.  If you explicitly set the
> > window backgroudn, the theme default of course is not used.
>
>
> It would really be cool if all that would be based on standard web 
> techniques. Why not use CSS for encoding color information (like in XUL 
> ;-) ? This way color schemes can be switched easily and it's quite 
> flexible in configuration and understood by almost everyone.

Why is everybody always pointing at XML. We already have a way to encode 
 colour information independently. We are just not using it.
In OpenStep there is the concept of colour lists to associate a colour 
with a name. Or the other way round, use a name to refer to a colour.

Most of the needed support for this is already in GNUstep. And the gui 
code mostly refers to system colours that way. What I did not do when 
rewriting the colour code some time ago was to fully replace the way 
system colours are handled. If we would change that and return named 
colours here (and also would provide the system colour list in Gorm), we 
would store mostly named colours that would be correct on any system the 
 program will get loaded.
There is a small penalty for doing this, the colour will have to be 
converted each time it is used to draw, but I don't think this will be 
high. And if so, we could still implement a simple cache to speed up the 
conversion.

Cheers
Fred