[Dev] Visual Style proposal

[John Anderson]

I agree with Bryan's comments, below.

I haven't been very happy with the current design of styles in CPIA. The 
vast majority of blocks either don't need a style or should use a style 
is best determined by the platform. For example tables and attribute 
editors on each platform almost always have a consistent look that you 
don't want to change too much. There are a few exceptions, e.g. rich 
text. I think the powerful general CSS mechanism works well for rich 
text, but not so well for other situations. To me it seems like it might 
make more sense to come up with a simpler style mechanism rather than a 
more complicated one like Alec is proposing.

John

Bryan Stearns wrote:

> (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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