[xwiki-devs] [Discussion] About Icon Themes
Hi. In XWiki 6.2, we have introduced the Icon Theme Application [1]. The idea was to be able to use Font Awesome in the Applications Panel without breaking all extensions. So we have a mapping between silk icons (that the extensions used until now) and the font awesome equivalents [2]. But, of course, the mapping is currently incomplete. For 2 reasons: 1/ It takes time to make it perfect (so feel free to improve it, directly on the wiki page! [2]) 2/ Some silk icons have no equivalent. Where a silk equivalent is missing, the Icon Theme Application automatically failbacks to the Silk icon, so something appears. Of course, it does not look very good when all icons are monochromatic except only one [3]. When there is no equivalent, we could have a strategy to not failback on Silk but instead using the most similar icon in Font Awesome. For example http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/resources/icons/silk/flag_blue.png and http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/resources/icons/silk/flag_green.png can both be mapped to http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/icon/flag/ . But it would be problem if an extension use both icons to represent 2 different actions. In my opinion, we should not do this and let the failback-process happens. But actually, having this mapping should be only used for backward compatibility. What I want to propose is about the future. We should not use the silk icons anymore with the hope that it will be correctly mapped in other icon themes. What I want to create, is our own list of icons. The XWiki icon set. But I am not talking about drawing new icons. I am talking about create an official mapping for the icons we support and that have a mapping in all existing icon themes. For example, I have create the "wiki" icon, which is mapped to http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/resources/icons/silk/world.png in silk and on http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/icon/globe/ in font-awesome. I believe we need to create that list and create a documentation about it somewhere (maybe in a page integrated in XE, but at least on the extension page). So when a user create an application, she no longer chose an icon from the Silk collection but from our own list. If we agree on that principle, we also need to agree on a convention about the name of our icons. I propose: 'some-name' which means everything in lower case and words separated by '-'. I hope you'll like the idea. Thanks, [1] http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Icon+Theme+Application (The Icon Theme Application) [2] http://design.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Proposal/IconSet (The mapping) [3] http://tof.canardpc.com/view/debc907e-d1ee-4e01-baff-dc740801e68d.jpg (Problem) -- Guillaume Delhumeau (gdelhumeau@xwiki.com) Research & Development Engineer at XWiki SAS Committer on the XWiki.org project
This sounds like a good idea. About the naming, shouldn't we use a prefix like font-awesome? I know this is kind of different context but anyway, I just launch the idea. On Wed, Oct 01, 2014 at 03:59:01PM +0200, Guillaume "Louis-Marie" Delhumeau wrote:
Hi.
In XWiki 6.2, we have introduced the Icon Theme Application [1]. The idea was to be able to use Font Awesome in the Applications Panel without breaking all extensions. So we have a mapping between silk icons (that the extensions used until now) and the font awesome equivalents [2].
But, of course, the mapping is currently incomplete. For 2 reasons: 1/ It takes time to make it perfect (so feel free to improve it, directly on the wiki page! [2]) 2/ Some silk icons have no equivalent.
Where a silk equivalent is missing, the Icon Theme Application automatically failbacks to the Silk icon, so something appears. Of course, it does not look very good when all icons are monochromatic except only one [3].
When there is no equivalent, we could have a strategy to not failback on Silk but instead using the most similar icon in Font Awesome. For example http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/resources/icons/silk/flag_blue.png and http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/resources/icons/silk/flag_green.png can both be mapped to http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/icon/flag/ . But it would be problem if an extension use both icons to represent 2 different actions. In my opinion, we should not do this and let the failback-process happens.
But actually, having this mapping should be only used for backward compatibility. What I want to propose is about the future. We should not use the silk icons anymore with the hope that it will be correctly mapped in other icon themes.
What I want to create, is our own list of icons. The XWiki icon set. But I am not talking about drawing new icons. I am talking about create an official mapping for the icons we support and that have a mapping in all existing icon themes.
For example, I have create the "wiki" icon, which is mapped to http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/resources/icons/silk/world.png in silk and on http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/icon/globe/ in font-awesome.
I believe we need to create that list and create a documentation about it somewhere (maybe in a page integrated in XE, but at least on the extension page). So when a user create an application, she no longer chose an icon from the Silk collection but from our own list.
If we agree on that principle, we also need to agree on a convention about the name of our icons. I propose: 'some-name' which means everything in lower case and words separated by '-'.
I hope you'll like the idea.
Thanks,
[1] http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Icon+Theme+Application (The Icon Theme Application) [2] http://design.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Proposal/IconSet (The mapping) [3] http://tof.canardpc.com/view/debc907e-d1ee-4e01-baff-dc740801e68d.jpg (Problem)
-- Guillaume Delhumeau (gdelhumeau@xwiki.com) Research & Development Engineer at XWiki SAS Committer on the XWiki.org project _______________________________________________ devs mailing list devs@xwiki.org http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
-- Jean Simard jean.simard@xwiki.com Research engineer at XWiki SAS http://www.xwiki.com Committer on the XWiki.org project http://www.xwiki.org
The prefix could be good to avoid having a name that already exists in Silk, but I'm not 100% sure that it would be that useful. 2014-10-01 16:04 GMT+02:00 Jean SIMARD <jean.simard@xwiki.com>:
This sounds like a good idea. About the naming, shouldn't we use a prefix like font-awesome? I know this is kind of different context but anyway, I just launch the idea.
On Wed, Oct 01, 2014 at 03:59:01PM +0200, Guillaume "Louis-Marie" Delhumeau wrote:
Hi.
In XWiki 6.2, we have introduced the Icon Theme Application [1]. The idea was to be able to use Font Awesome in the Applications Panel without breaking all extensions. So we have a mapping between silk icons (that the extensions used until now) and the font awesome equivalents [2].
But, of course, the mapping is currently incomplete. For 2 reasons: 1/ It takes time to make it perfect (so feel free to improve it, directly on the wiki page! [2]) 2/ Some silk icons have no equivalent.
Where a silk equivalent is missing, the Icon Theme Application automatically failbacks to the Silk icon, so something appears. Of course, it does not look very good when all icons are monochromatic except only one [3].
When there is no equivalent, we could have a strategy to not failback on Silk but instead using the most similar icon in Font Awesome. For example http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/resources/icons/silk/flag_blue.png and http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/resources/icons/silk/flag_green.png can both be mapped to http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/icon/flag/ . But it would be problem if an extension use both icons to represent 2 different actions. In my opinion, we should not do this and let the failback-process happens.
But actually, having this mapping should be only used for backward compatibility. What I want to propose is about the future. We should not use the silk icons anymore with the hope that it will be correctly mapped in other icon themes.
What I want to create, is our own list of icons. The XWiki icon set. But I am not talking about drawing new icons. I am talking about create an official mapping for the icons we support and that have a mapping in all existing icon themes.
For example, I have create the "wiki" icon, which is mapped to http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/resources/icons/silk/world.png in silk and on http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/icon/globe/ in font-awesome.
I believe we need to create that list and create a documentation about it somewhere (maybe in a page integrated in XE, but at least on the extension page). So when a user create an application, she no longer chose an icon from the Silk collection but from our own list.
If we agree on that principle, we also need to agree on a convention about the name of our icons. I propose: 'some-name' which means everything in lower case and words separated by '-'.
I hope you'll like the idea.
Thanks,
[1]
http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Icon+Theme+Application
(The Icon Theme Application) [2] http://design.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Proposal/IconSet (The mapping) [3] http://tof.canardpc.com/view/debc907e-d1ee-4e01-baff-dc740801e68d.jpg (Problem)
-- Guillaume Delhumeau (gdelhumeau@xwiki.com) Research & Development Engineer at XWiki SAS Committer on the XWiki.org project _______________________________________________ devs mailing list devs@xwiki.org http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
-- Jean Simard jean.simard@xwiki.com Research engineer at XWiki SAS http://www.xwiki.com Committer on the XWiki.org project http://www.xwiki.org _______________________________________________ devs mailing list devs@xwiki.org http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
-- Guillaume Delhumeau (gdelhumeau@xwiki.com) Research & Development Engineer at XWiki SAS Committer on the XWiki.org project
On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 4:59 PM, Guillaume "Louis-Marie" Delhumeau < gdelhumeau@xwiki.com> wrote:
Hi.
In XWiki 6.2, we have introduced the Icon Theme Application [1]. The idea was to be able to use Font Awesome in the Applications Panel without breaking all extensions. So we have a mapping between silk icons (that the extensions used until now) and the font awesome equivalents [2].
But, of course, the mapping is currently incomplete. For 2 reasons: 1/ It takes time to make it perfect (so feel free to improve it, directly on the wiki page! [2]) 2/ Some silk icons have no equivalent.
Where a silk equivalent is missing, the Icon Theme Application automatically failbacks to the Silk icon, so something appears. Of course, it does not look very good when all icons are monochromatic except only one [3].
When there is no equivalent, we could have a strategy to not failback on Silk but instead using the most similar icon in Font Awesome. For example http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/resources/icons/silk/flag_blue.png and http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/resources/icons/silk/flag_green.png can both be mapped to http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/icon/flag/ . But it would be problem if an extension use both icons to represent 2 different actions. In my opinion, we should not do this and let the failback-process happens.
An improvement to this would be to provide also a color in the mapping. Being a font icon set, from CSS is very easy to give a blue or a green color to the icon (if as you said the developer needed the color difference).
But actually, having this mapping should be only used for backward compatibility. What I want to propose is about the future. We should not use the silk icons anymore with the hope that it will be correctly mapped in other icon themes.
What I want to create, is our own list of icons. The XWiki icon set. But I am not talking about drawing new icons. I am talking about create an official mapping for the icons we support and that have a mapping in all existing icon themes.
For example, I have create the "wiki" icon, which is mapped to http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/resources/icons/silk/world.png in silk and on http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/icon/globe/ in font-awesome.
I believe we need to create that list and create a documentation about it somewhere (maybe in a page integrated in XE, but at least on the extension page). So when a user create an application, she no longer chose an icon from the Silk collection but from our own list.
IMO we really need this list because without it I don't think we can create an easy UI that can change the icon for the IconThemes. Just like we have specific variables in ColorThemes, the same we will have a finit list of standard icons that we use across the wiki (and as you said that we support). Related to this topic I started a very very long time a go a study of icons used inside XWiki, you can see some informations here http://design.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Standards/Icons According to the study and regarding the convention we will need something like: A. 'entity' B. 'action' C. 'entity-action' D. 'entity-subtype' ... ? Example: A. 'wiki', 'space, 'page', 'attachment', 'comment', etc. B. 'add/create', 'delete/remove', 'edit', 'copy', etc. C. 'comment-add', 'page-add', 'user-delete', etc. D. 'arrow-down', 'user-disabled', 'page-zip', etc. Maybe we should add also a prefix, like 'icon' or 'theme-icon' if we think in the future we might have something like 'theme-{icon|color|etc.}' although might be longer. Thanks, Caty
If we agree on that principle, we also need to agree on a convention about the name of our icons. I propose: 'some-name' which means everything in lower case and words separated by '-'.
I hope you'll like the idea.
Thanks,
[1] http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Icon+Theme+Application (The Icon Theme Application) [2] http://design.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Proposal/IconSet (The mapping) [3] http://tof.canardpc.com/view/debc907e-d1ee-4e01-baff-dc740801e68d.jpg (Problem)
-- Guillaume Delhumeau (gdelhumeau@xwiki.com) Research & Development Engineer at XWiki SAS Committer on the XWiki.org project _______________________________________________ devs mailing list devs@xwiki.org http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 4:59 PM, Guillaume "Louis-Marie" Delhumeau <gdelhumeau@xwiki.com> wrote:
Hi.
In XWiki 6.2, we have introduced the Icon Theme Application [1]. The idea was to be able to use Font Awesome in the Applications Panel without breaking all extensions. So we have a mapping between silk icons (that the extensions used until now) and the font awesome equivalents [2].
But, of course, the mapping is currently incomplete. For 2 reasons: 1/ It takes time to make it perfect (so feel free to improve it, directly on the wiki page! [2]) 2/ Some silk icons have no equivalent.
Where a silk equivalent is missing, the Icon Theme Application automatically failbacks to the Silk icon, so something appears. Of course, it does not look very good when all icons are monochromatic except only one [3].
When there is no equivalent, we could have a strategy to not failback on Silk but instead using the most similar icon in Font Awesome. For example http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/resources/icons/silk/flag_blue.png and http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/resources/icons/silk/flag_green.png can both be mapped to http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/icon/flag/ . But it would be problem if an extension use both icons to represent 2 different actions. In my opinion, we should not do this and let the failback-process happens.
But actually, having this mapping should be only used for backward compatibility. What I want to propose is about the future. We should not use the silk icons anymore with the hope that it will be correctly mapped in other icon themes.
What I want to create, is our own list of icons. The XWiki icon set. But I am not talking about drawing new icons. I am talking about create an official mapping for the icons we support and that have a mapping in all existing icon themes.
For example, I have create the "wiki" icon, which is mapped to http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/resources/icons/silk/world.png in silk and on http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/icon/globe/ in font-awesome.
I believe we need to create that list and create a documentation about it somewhere (maybe in a page integrated in XE, but at least on the extension page). So when a user create an application, she no longer chose an icon from the Silk collection but from our own list.
The applications we write on top of the XWiki platform can be from any domain. It's hard to create a list of icons that cover a large number of domains. Even with Silk, which has a lot of icons, I often couldn't find a good match for my domain-specific need. Moreover, if you don't plan to draw new icons, then the XWiki icon set would include only icons that are common to more icon sets and thus it will be even more limited (I doubt you want to mix icons from different icon sets). The XWiki icon set could work for icons that are used in the XWiki skin (e.g. standard actions like edit or delete and XWiki entities like wiki, space, page or attachment). But I'm not convinced it will be very helpful for an application developer that will look for domain specific icons. Thanks, Marius
If we agree on that principle, we also need to agree on a convention about the name of our icons. I propose: 'some-name' which means everything in lower case and words separated by '-'.
I hope you'll like the idea.
Thanks,
[1] http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Icon+Theme+Application (The Icon Theme Application) [2] http://design.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Proposal/IconSet (The mapping) [3] http://tof.canardpc.com/view/debc907e-d1ee-4e01-baff-dc740801e68d.jpg (Problem)
-- Guillaume Delhumeau (gdelhumeau@xwiki.com) Research & Development Engineer at XWiki SAS Committer on the XWiki.org project _______________________________________________ devs mailing list devs@xwiki.org http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
FYI I have started: http://design.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Proposal/XWiki+Icon+Set Do not hesitate to comment on this (on the name & the icons I have chosen) and to contribute (edit > wiki). And I am also designing a page in the wiki that lists all these icons: http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-11388 (with mockups) I don't know if it will be in XWiki 6.3 though. Thanks, 2014-10-02 10:41 GMT+02:00 Marius Dumitru Florea < mariusdumitru.florea@xwiki.com>:
On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 4:59 PM, Guillaume "Louis-Marie" Delhumeau <gdelhumeau@xwiki.com> wrote:
Hi.
In XWiki 6.2, we have introduced the Icon Theme Application [1]. The idea was to be able to use Font Awesome in the Applications Panel without breaking all extensions. So we have a mapping between silk icons (that the extensions used until now) and the font awesome equivalents [2].
But, of course, the mapping is currently incomplete. For 2 reasons: 1/ It takes time to make it perfect (so feel free to improve it, directly on the wiki page! [2]) 2/ Some silk icons have no equivalent.
Where a silk equivalent is missing, the Icon Theme Application automatically failbacks to the Silk icon, so something appears. Of course, it does not look very good when all icons are monochromatic except only one [3].
When there is no equivalent, we could have a strategy to not failback on Silk but instead using the most similar icon in Font Awesome. For example http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/resources/icons/silk/flag_blue.png and http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/resources/icons/silk/flag_green.png can both be mapped to http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/icon/flag/ . But it would be problem if an extension use both icons to represent 2 different actions. In my opinion, we should not do this and let the failback-process happens.
But actually, having this mapping should be only used for backward compatibility. What I want to propose is about the future. We should not use the silk icons anymore with the hope that it will be correctly mapped in other icon themes.
What I want to create, is our own list of icons. The XWiki icon set. But I am not talking about drawing new icons. I am talking about create an official mapping for the icons we support and that have a mapping in all existing icon themes.
For example, I have create the "wiki" icon, which is mapped to http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/resources/icons/silk/world.png in silk and on http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/icon/globe/ in font-awesome.
I believe we need to create that list and create a documentation about it somewhere (maybe in a page integrated in XE, but at least on the extension page). So when a user create an application, she no longer chose an icon from the Silk collection but from our own list.
The applications we write on top of the XWiki platform can be from any domain. It's hard to create a list of icons that cover a large number of domains. Even with Silk, which has a lot of icons, I often couldn't find a good match for my domain-specific need. Moreover, if you don't plan to draw new icons, then the XWiki icon set would include only icons that are common to more icon sets and thus it will be even more limited (I doubt you want to mix icons from different icon sets).
The XWiki icon set could work for icons that are used in the XWiki skin (e.g. standard actions like edit or delete and XWiki entities like wiki, space, page or attachment). But I'm not convinced it will be very helpful for an application developer that will look for domain specific icons.
Thanks, Marius
If we agree on that principle, we also need to agree on a convention
about
the name of our icons. I propose: 'some-name' which means everything in lower case and words separated by '-'.
I hope you'll like the idea.
Thanks,
[1]
http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Icon+Theme+Application
(The Icon Theme Application) [2] http://design.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Proposal/IconSet (The mapping) [3] http://tof.canardpc.com/view/debc907e-d1ee-4e01-baff-dc740801e68d.jpg (Problem)
-- Guillaume Delhumeau (gdelhumeau@xwiki.com) Research & Development Engineer at XWiki SAS Committer on the XWiki.org project _______________________________________________ devs mailing list devs@xwiki.org http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
devs mailing list devs@xwiki.org http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
-- Guillaume Delhumeau (gdelhumeau@xwiki.com) Research & Development Engineer at XWiki SAS Committer on the XWiki.org project
participants (4)
-
Ecaterina Moraru (Valica) -
Guillaume "Louis-Marie" Delhumeau -
Jean SIMARD -
Marius Dumitru Florea