[Dev] Visual Style proposal

[Bryan Stearns]

(Alec and I had an in-person conversation about this, but he suggested I 
include my feedback in the discussion...)

- The existing model already gives us a mechanism to separate 
presentation characteristics (font, etc) from structure (block 
hierarchy), and though it's currently not bidirectional, we could make 
it so if there were a need. I don't see the benefit in using Query to 
relate blocks to styles.

- Blocks aren't blind to styles, and wouldn't be even if we converted to 
your mechanism: CPIA isn't a browser where a presentation engine 
combines style information and a data description and generates a 
presentation -- each CPIA block is responsible for its own presentation, 
so each will still have to interrogate the style information as it does 
now.

- A block might need to know more than one style (for instance, a label 
font and a value font), or the colors to be used for different parts of 
what it's drawing -- your model appears to preclude this.

- The current separate characterStyle and colorStyle structures could 
easily be combined or made more generic, but again, what's the need?

- There are problems with the existing mechanism, like per-platform 
layout issues (font family & size defaults, margins, etc), but your 
proposal doesn't address them.

...Bryan


Alec Flett wrote:

> A while back I posted about a proposal for applying styles to 
> chandler. Here's my proposal:
>
> http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Chandler/VisualStyle
>
> This would replace the current colorStyle, characterStyle, and so forth.
>
> Alec
>
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