Bugzilla CSS plan

[Ludovic Dubost]

I like it.. especially since this seems close to what I did in the patch 
in bug 69654.. It seems to be 251068 is a duplicate of 69654..
The patch 
<http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=136804&action=view> I did 
there allows to apply CSS to templates that are moved to HTML 
transitional using DIVs. There is a skin selection mecanism in the user 
preferences.

Example is in action at http://bugzilla.xpertnet.biz/

One thing that could be interesting is to link the use of a non default 
CSS directory to a non default Template directory.. Sometimes skins need 
to have modifications in the templates.
Also the skin directory should allow for use of images and javascript 
files which are necessary of user interface customization not possible 
in pure CSS.

Finally, it could be interesting also to allow in each skin, multiple 
alternate stylesheets which would need to be declared somewhere (in a 
text file in the skin directory - this seems the more logical solution - 
or in the bugzilla params or in the user preferences).

Ludovic

Myk Melez a écrit :

> Bugzilla is being converted to structural HTML and stylistic CSS for 
> both skinnability <http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=251068> 
> and customizability 
> <http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=251740>, and we need a 
> CSS plan that works for both.  Here's what I'm thinking:
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> We move the Bugzilla CSS files, which currently live in css/, to 
> skins/default/.  We style all Bugzilla pages with 
> skins/default/global.css, and we style pages needing special styling 
> with page-specific files named after the page they style (f.e. 
> skins/default/buglist.css).
>
> [Why move from css/ to skins/?  Because modern CSS often includes 
> images, and we need to store them somewhere, and it'll be much easier 
> to install skins into a single directory instead of breaking out the 
> stylesheet and image files, and "css" is misleading if we're storing 
> images there too.]
>
> checksetup.pl creates a skins/custom/ directory.  We add notes to the 
> skins/default/ files telling customizers to override default rules by 
> putting them into the equivalent files in skins/custom/.  We also 
> point out that customizers can put all their rules, including 
> page-specific rules, into the single file skins/custom/global.css to 
> make things easier.  We give all body tags page-specific IDs to make 
> this possible.  We add a caveat about the performance cost of this 
> approach.
>
> checksetup.pl creates a skins/other/ directory.  We tell installation 
> admins who want to add skins as alternate stylesheets to put them into 
> this directory.  Skins can be either a single file named 
> skins/other/<name>.css or a directory of files named 
> skins/other/<name>/.  The <name> of the file/directory will be the 
> title of the alternate stylesheet.
>
> [Why make checksetup create the skins/custom/ and skins/other/ 
> directories?  Because we don't want them managed by CVS, since that 
> complicates the output of "cvs diff".]
>
> Bugzilla automatically adds custom and alternate stylesheets to pages 
> via a template plugin that trawls skins/custom/ and skins/other/ and 
> provides a list of available custom/alternate stylesheets to 
> header.html.tmpl.
>
> header.html.tmpl generates persistent stylesheet tags for custom 
> stylesheets, preferred stylesheet tags with the title "standard" for 
> default stylesheets, and alternate stylesheet tags with the titles 
> "<name>" for other stylesheets.  Thus pages take on the default style, 
> as modified by custom styles, until the user selects an alternate 
> style, whereupon they take on the default style, as modified by custom 
> styles.
>
> More on persistent, preferred, and alternate stylesheets:
>   http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/present/styles.html#h-14.3.1
>   http://www.alistapart.com/articles/alternate/
>
> Installations admins can choose a different default skin via a 
> parameter, in which case the skin they choose becomes the preferred 
> stylesheet.
>
> Portions of this proposal that can be usefully implemented 
> independently should be.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Thoughts?
>
> -myk
>


-- 
Ludovic Dubost
Blog: http://www.ludovic.org/blog/
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