'strict' color mode?

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Thursday 21 June 2007, Olaf Schmidt wrote:
> There were no responses here (so no objections), but do we need a positive
> response to have this in KDE 4.0?

sorry, i ignored this thread as well as i got tired of the colour 
(un)discussions. but yes, i object to this API addition.

here's why:

it should be an implementation detail of KCS and KCS should evolve over time 
to provide for the needs of, well, colour schemes in apps. that means it 
should eventually:

- store and retreive user customizations
- allow for custom colours to be registered with it

then you can sink all the accessibility concerns over colours into KCS and 
every app that uses KCS will be compliant. this makes the goal simple: have 
KDE apps use KCS for their colour schemes.

by providing additional API, we will be asking application developers to wrap 
every colour accessor with additional if()/else's for a user case they almost 
certainly never see themselves. (excuse the pun)

this will result in more code needing to be written, duplication of the 
facility in every application and will certainly lead to inconsistencies 
where it is either missed due to human error (common for things like this) or 
even just because the author doesn't care. honestly, a lot of apps will 
simply not do this correctly if every author needs to do it manually.

unless we have a brigade of accessibility programmers to rush in for 4.0, i 
don't see many apps tooling up their colour schemes to include such checks. 
so i don't see it as a huge problem where we must get this in for 4.0 and 
therefore be stuck with that API for all of 4.x

as KCS evolves, those who would use checks against strict() would stop needing 
too (although much of the code would probably remain anyways) leaving us with 
either more work or lots of useless code. ah, code maintenance!

so, summary:

imho this belongs as an internal detail of KCS; KCS should evolve over time to 
provide the needs for colour schemes; KDE aps should use KCS.

i think this way you'll actually achieve your goal of accessibility approved 
colour usage in kde applications, though it requires thinking in 1-2 year 
time spans. i doubt you'll ever reach your goal with strict()

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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