Skins

[Frédéric Buclin]

Le 29. 12. 15 12:52, Gervase Markham a écrit :
> Skins, AIUI, do not generally provide additional functionality. They
> just look different.

"just look different" is what skins are about, yes. The reason we ship
two skins is because not everybody like the Classical skin, and not
everybody like the Dusk skin. Even Firefox has themes/skins. Even BMO
ships 6 different skins. There must be a reason.


> I was to suggest that the high cost to us as
> Bugzilla developers and to admins of maintaining multiple skins is not
> worth it for the user value this generates.

"High cost" where? How often did you, as a developer, have to deal with
the fact that we ship 2 skins? As admin, the cost is zero. If you made
customizations which do not play well with one of the skins, you just
have to turn off this user pref and that's it. All users will be forced
to use the skin selected by the admin.

Shipping 2 skins has been a real plus for us. It forces us to think if
the Classical skin (the one currently in skins/standard/) doesn't
prevent custom skins from working correctly. For instance, we learned
that "!important" should be avoided as much as possible, else it would
take precedence over custom rules. Keeping only one skin will inevitably
trigger such problems in the future. So IMO, a valid reason to keep only
one skin would be because this skin is great enough that everybody like
it, not because developers are too lazy to maintain a 2nd skin.

Another point: it's currently very easy to write your own skin because
you can imitate what is in contrib/Dusk/*.css. You can easily clone it
in e.g. contrib/Foo/ and start playing with CSS files there. If we
remove the 2nd skin, will the whole skins/contrib/ directory go away? If
not, how to avoid the confusion between skins/contrib/ and
skins/custom/? (and do we really still need skins/custom/, to begin with?)


> * Remove the user preference for selecting a skin
> * Add an admin param to define the skin on a per-installation basis

This brings no value, and doesn't make anyone's life easier. If an
installation has only one working skin, then the admin can already force
all users to use it. If there are several working skins, I see no reason
to force everybody to use the same skin. I could even imagine that some
skins are better suited for smartphones/small screens, or for users with
visual disabilities who require a skin with higher contrast or a
simplified UI or displayed differently to ease readability.


LpSolit