Hi, everyone.
We had a brief discussion on the e4 call about this topic and thought it
would be good to make sure everyone is aware of it.
We are currently working with a graphic designer to modernize the style of
the Eclipse 4.0 workbench. That is, what is the default stylesheet for the
Eclipse SDK running on e4?
One of the more interesting constraints, which we've always had in Eclipse,
is balancing the desire for a custom/modern UI with respect for platform
look and feel, and the user's platform theme. In Eclipse 3.x, we've done
this by using native widgets in most places, and looking up system colors
as a reference point when choosing colors.
For e4, we still walk this line. Sure, we will have the technology to
completely reskin the workbench, and folks are free to do so. But for the
default look, I believe we will still be balancing these concerns. We may
take more leeway in applying gradients, changing tab shapes, using
background images or shading, but all of this should be done while still
blending with the platform theme choices.
CSS support presents a new wrinkle. It's not good enough to simply make
the right color choices for the workbench. Sure, we can do the math
internally and pick the right colors. But it would be ideal if we could
provide developers with the ability to style their own applications in this
platform respecting way, and include web components that could blend
nicely. Since CSS is RGB-based for color attributes, we're looking at ways
to specify a more HSV-style color for elements, where the hue could
optionally be ignored and instead be derived from platform theme colors.
Note we aren't just talking about background colors for images and
gradients. We'd like to be able to specify widget colors in this way.
How should this be specified in a stylesheet?
Surely someone has already given some thought to this problem. If you have
ideas, please comment in this bug! [1].
A more general discussion of the visual design work can be found here. [2]
And watching this bug [3] will ensure you see mockups when there is
something to show.
thanks,
susan
[1] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=296175
[2] http://wiki.eclipse.org/E4/CSS/Visual_Design
[3] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=293481
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