Re: Widget Appearance

Dris wrote:
> 
> On Nov 17, 2003, at 9:22 PM, Dylan Schiemann wrote:
> 
>> CSS could provide a chrome styling selector mechanism, but not the 
>> actual selectors.  Meaning that CSS could define a general mechanism 
>> for selecting the chrome, and implementations could follow this 
>> mechanism for defining their own pseudo-elements for things like 
>> scrollbars.
> 
> I should hope selectors would all be standardized solidly.  We don't 
> want another mess like the DOM was for a while...

I don't think it is within the scope of css to standardize what
pseudo-elements constitute user interfaces. css instead defines 
selectors for existing standards.  It is a lot easier to define standard 
elements for form user interface elements as those are already defined 
by other specs (HTML, XForms, etc.).

Since there is no cross-platform standard for chrome user inteface 
elements, I think that css should allow for pseudo-elements to be easily 
extended until such a standard exists, if it is to take any action at all.

It would be up to a user agent to support pseudo-elements for the 
platforms which they support, thought this is certainly a a nontrivial 
task.  In a mechanism similar to how the DOM WG has lists of bindings 
for different programming languages, the CSS WG could gather collections 
of such pseudo-elements from various user interfaces to be submitted by 
interface developers.  Then, for scrolling, in addition to scrollbar 
definitions for numerous platforms, you'd have other mechanisms such as 
panning and pie menus.

This would require the css author to provide a large list of 
pseudo-elements if they wanted to cover a large number of platforms, or 
they could just cover a few selected platforms and allow the others to 
be set as system default, analogous to specifying lists of font-families.

FWIW,
-Dylan

--
Dylan Schiemann
http://www.sitepen.com/
http://www.dylanschiemann.com/

Received on Friday, 21 November 2003 03:40:27 UTC