Re: CSS 3 color module and deprecation of "system" colors

Daniel Glazman wrote:
> The 'appearance' property was introduced under the assumption that (a) 
> system colors are only one of the characteristics you want/need to apply to a 
> given element (b) you don't need to apply such a characteristic independently of
> the others (c) system colors are too weak to represent precisely modern UIs
> that often use a combination of colors.

The 'appearance' property is a nice idea and has its uses, but these 
assumptions clearly underline its limitations.

(a) is true, but they're better than nothing, and 'appearance' hardly 
seems to cover the whole ground as currently defined. On my system 
buttons have a scalable gradient background and a glow filter, is 
appearance setting the 'filter' property adequately?

(b) is true when and only when one wishes to reproduce an existing 
widget from the list defined by the CSS WG. When defining some form of 
new widget, you may wish to reuse the system colours, it would make sense.

(c) true, but as far as I can tell from the UI draft so is 'appearance'.

Furthermore, I thought that one of the ideas behind CSS 3 Modularization 
was increased reusability of CSS by other specifications. The 
'appearance' property as described today only works in CSS contexts 
where 'fill', 'background', 'border', etc. have some form of meaning but 
is otherwise completely useless.

I don't disagree that there are issues with system colours and that they 
are far from perfect. But can you make the case that they are completely 
broken? If not, don't deprecate them.

-- 
Robin Berjon
   Senior Research Scientist
   Expway, http://expway.com/

Received on Tuesday, 6 September 2005 08:49:16 UTC