[Dev] Chandler styles

[Alec Flett]

>>>Sounds like at this point this is water under the bridge, though :)
>>>      
>>>
>>For now, at least.
>>
>>    
>>
Exactly - for now. I actually had CSS in mind when I gave my earlier 
proposal - it was kind of a backwards CSS "class" model.  I don't see 
any need to shoehorn actual CSS into this, but instead we should 
leverage the tools we have to get the most gain with as little work as 
possible. I'm not sure CSS will ever be completely appropriate for 
chandler, but even if we can match some of the selector model, people 
will be able to adapt their understanding of rule matches and so forth.

I've thought about this a bit further and I think we can accomplish 
something very similar to id/class matching like CSS by making use of 
some of chandler's Query infrastructure, and some of the bidirectional 
stuff, simplier than my earlier proposal.

Specifically:

<Style>
  <!-- almost identical to CSS's #id selector, applying to a specific 
block -->
  <applyToBlock itemref="somedoc:SomeSpecificBlock">
  <StyleRule.../>
</Style>

and
<Style>
  <!-- almost identical to CSS's .class selector, applying to a set of 
blocks -->
  <applyToBlocks rule="for i in ... where someattribute='somevalue'"/>
  <StyleRule.../>
</Style>

If down the line someone wanted to adapt this stuff to read rules from 
CSS and store them in the repository in the same way they would if they 
came in from parcel.xml, more power to them! The serialization format 
doesn't matter as long as we're consistent about how we store it in the 
repository.

Alec

>>But, per Alec,  I would like to see the visual appearance of Chandler in
>>its current state cleaned up as long as it doesn't introduce material
>>delays.
>>    
>>
>
>I don't think switching to a different style description language would
>provide any visual cleaning in the short term.  Using CSS instead of a
>custom style language is more of a platform/interop issue.  If you tell
> a web designer (or a designer familiar with Mozilla) they should do
>styling using CSS, it should be easy for them to theme Chandler or their
>favorite parcel.
>
>  
>



>Designers certainly can learn a new language, I think the pool of people
>who'll do this is smaller than the pool who would hack at something that
>used CSS.
>
>On the other hand, I really don't think Chandler wants to reimplement
>XUL, or make CPIA look like DOM.  Many facets of CSS just won't apply to
>Chandler, ever.  It's entirely possible a partial implementation of CSS
>might be more frustrating to web developers than learning a new style
>language!
>
>It's not clear to me how much trying to do a limited amount of styling
>using CSS would delay, say, 0.6.  I suspect it would slow things down a
>fair bit.  However, this might be one of those things that will slow us
>down more the longer we wait to implement it.
>
>Sincerely,
>Jeffrey
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