[RFC] Color usability time...

[Matthew Woehlke]

Robert Knight wrote:
> Just a word about prioritisation.  Your post discusses quite a variety
> of topics.  I think the addition of new colour roles is far and away
> the most important item in the list - so perhaps we should concentrate
> on that for now.

Agreed. My main motivation for doing the other stuff is that a: it is 
also needed, and b: it's practically done already :-). The only thing 
really to do is decide what the API's look like. Other than that I agree 
on the priorities; I just posted 'the great laundry list of everything'.

> For example, colors to indicate:
> [snip list]

Suggestions relative to the list should probably be done in reference to 
Olaf's original document :-).

Btw, Aaron, you are 100% right that numbers should never appear in usage 
of these API's. I'm not sure how obvious that was in the original 
message, but let me be perfectly clear that I fully agree with you :-).

Anyway, since this /is/ just a list, we can (to a limited extent) keep 
tweaking it for a while longer. Right now, defining the API is most 
important...

> I am going to be possibly controversial here and suggest that we don't
> rush to provide a configuration tool with KDE to change all of these
> colours individually,   Instead with the focus on trying to provide a
> selection of attractive and tested colour schemes, including several
> to cater for common problems which people may have with colours.

...which means I agree with this. In fact, this is exactly what I mean 
by pushing the API first, there is a real chance the configuration 
widgets (i.e. the kcmshell module) will come later.

> One other thing is that there are times when it might an application
> might require a use which is not covered in the list.  Perhaps we
> could provide a method for an application to ask whether a particular
> colour combination is acceptable ( ie.
> KSomeClass::areColorsAcceptable(foregroundColor,backgroundColor) ) and
> if not, the application can fall back to something safer.

Yes, this is definitely something to keep in mind. The hope is that 
there will be enough roles to 'repurpose' existing ones (as I said 
previously, the roles are usage /suggestions/ not commandments ;-) ), 
but we may indeed want more than eight for that to be achievable.

-- 
Matthew
"In the beginning was the word, and the word was
content-type: text/plain" -- Martin Schulze