Splash with a touch of style

Hi,   
Seems evident from various platforms that implement splash screens that developers require a degree of stylistic control over the size, orientation, and placement of splash screens. Existing platforms, have address this in a number of ways:  

1. Through the file name: <basename><orientation_modifier><scale_modifier><device_modifier>.png  
2. Through attributes in the configuration document of an application:  (e.g., backgroundColor="#FFFFFF")  
3. Directly in code.  

Approaches above may address the use cases, but, in the case of 1. it forces files to be named in a very particular way (which can be annoying)… and, in the case of 2, pilling on attributes seems to replicate the mistakes of early HTML versions (it stinks of <body bgcolor="magenta">) while not scaling very well. And 3 may be impractical because it requires code execution, and the splash screen wants to be shown before code execution.  

So, to meet stylistic needs of developers (while avoiding some of the issues above) I would like to propose the addition of a "style" attribute to the <splash> element (and while simultaneously introducing a whole bunch of new issues:)). For example:

<splash style="background-color: black;
width: 50%;
height: 50%;
left: 25%;
top: 25%;
" src="images/spalsh.png" />

Initially, the supported CSS rules could be quite small… but with a bit of time, it could be expanded to support gradients, and other useful CSS goodies.

We could even mint a new set of CSS rules just for splash screens, like "splash-position: left top;" or "splash-position: center center; splash-orientation: portrait".  

Thoughts?  

--  
Marcos Caceres
http://datadriven.com.au

Received on Thursday, 23 February 2012 19:26:54 UTC