How should we store Styles in Chandler?

Monday, March 13th 2006

Jed (host), Philippe (note taker), John, Jeffrey, Bryan

Main problems

• Solve the consistency problems across the platform and within the apps (between blocks and parcels)
• Get designers to modify the styles element easily

Design

• As Pythonic as possible
• Loaded from files
• Not CSS though, no cascading required
• We try to stay as close as possible to the parcel model

John : May be we could have a dialog to change those values instead of editing a file Jed : Text file not the final choice, it will actually be Python code but easily editable by non-coder. We can add UI for editing on top of that (that would be done by Darshana)

2 categories of styles

• easy things like text fonts : well supported by wx
• hard things like margins and borders because not supported by wx or rather wx is limited to what the native controls provide

Issues

• Preferences we provide
• Platform settings and themes
• Have a set of OOTB styles so that parcels can reuse them and don't have to restate styles
• Font size : should be defined relatively to the platform default font, have settings different per platforms

Steps to move forward

• Jed to propose the easy way to edit the "easy" attributes asap
• Darshana to expose them through an editing UI
• Jed to work on the "hard" part that are currently not accessible with wx (padding and borders especially)

Related Proposals

• Alec's writeup from looking at this problem last year: VisualStyle