Dojo Forum

On Friday 16 November 2007 09:17, Daniel wrote:

Unfortunately, no. Well, not exactly. Tundra is the most refined theme that
exists. I started soria at a point where dijit was settling down (pre 1.0),
and fell behind keeping it up (so it admittedly lacks, and has never been
considered for IE) ... There is a Noir theme, which is mostly black, but
almost entirely unfinished. Then there is a squid theme, which is an
automatic inversion of Tundra to see if we've missed anything serious.

The principal behind soria is that it is actually image-color-neutral, and all
the coloring and gradients are done with white or black alpha pngs (which is
why ie6 hates it so much) over nodes with background-color: set in CSS. The
principal (if i could get it working in ie6) could supercede Tundra by simply
specifying a new icons.png/gif file, and changing the borders and background
colors to the greyscales they are now. It was a good idea. IE6 is an evil
beast.

There is one other contributor I know working on a 'nicer' varient on tundra,
with a little more color highlights and whatnot, but no ETA on that landing.
It looks promising though, very good stuff. I don't recall the name he was
using for it.

Also, i've had the idea to get going some kind of theming-competition, a dijit
css-theme-garden kind of idea where everyone takes a sample page (like
themeTester, but expose more widgets) and come up with a new theme, and get
points based on accessibility and number of widgets touched and overall
style ...

But, this whole 'themeing dijit is easy because it's all css now' thing is a
relatively new concept to dojo, so I'm confident soon enough more and more
people will start contributing at least partial themes. (eg: "here's a
rounded tab container theme supplement") ...

hope this helps,
Peter Higgins

peter e higgins wrote:

Oh, this is not good. I really don't like tundra, it's all gray and
boring. And naturally, my website has to work on IE6. I guess I can
modify tundra to make it blue-ish, but that sort of thing takes a long
time. I don't look forward editing 110 images and reading through 1,462
lines of CSS.

How do I create a new theme? Can I just rename the directory 'tundra'
and the file tundra.css?

Surely you knew that IE6 can't handle alpha transparency... Now, I'm
not sure I undersand how Soria uses alpha transparency. Do you put one
image on top of another and use transparency? That seems strange. Which
files have the transparency? All the PNG files?

I'd be interested to know how Soria works. I'm no expert, but there's a
non-zero chance I might have a useful idea.

Cheers,
Daniel.

Hi Daniel,

The main push of Dojo 1.0 was to make all Dojo widgets have a common
theme, and to make it simple to override it with your own themes.
However, as you have pointed out, creating a theme takes a long time,
so only one fully complete and tested theme is available with 1.0.

The grey theme for Tundra was chose so that it's essentially colour
neutral, and will suit the largest cross section of users. For
example, imagine if a blue theme had been developed as the default
(many 0.4.x Dojo widgets were blue) - many more users would be
complaining that it clashed with their site's design that will
complain about Tundra.

Now that the framework is there, more and more themes will come online
over time, and it will be up to you to simply include a different CSS
file. Until then however, the Dojo project would be more than happy
to accept any and all contributions you would like to make to this
effort.

Thanks

Shane

On 16/11/2007, Daniel wrote:

it's no so much soria's fault as is it IE6's mangling of paths.

the IE6/soria combo could be acheived via a filter: declaration using a
transparent gif for the alpha, it's a common practice. the problem is, the
filter url is relative to the _page being viewed_ rather than "where in the
css it's defined" ... so without knowing an absolute url to a blank.gif file,
its not feasable to include the fix into soria. one idea was to have a
smaller .css file with _just_ the ie6 fix in it, so people could easily
locate it and adjust the path to their blank.gif file accordingly, but i
don't like that idea myself. i want the theme to "drop in" ...

we were trying to use an expression:() to trick ie into pointing the path to
the blank.gif file (now near-statically located in dojo/resources/blank.gif)
by parsing out some kind of path from dojo.moduleUrl or dj_basePath (or
whatever it has become) but it's not been successful yet.

another alternative is a dojo.requireCss() (or dojox.requireCss() for fancy
path fixing, etc) ... but it's not been discussed enough.

please, feel free to hack away at soria. I did most of the legwork removing
image dependencies and wrapping all classes that used (for instance
tundra/images/gradientBg.png) into one, and making them share a single
background-img: gradientTopBg.png line. like i said, i've just 'fallen
behind' in maintiain it. I don't suspect major dijit changes are coming, and
once we get both up to par it will be easier to maintain in both places.

tundra.css is big, but it's divided into component parts more or less. i
tried to go through and put comments like /* dijit.TitlePane */ at the top of
each grouping, for easy searching.

how soria uses alpha: okay new thread just saw it come in
but yes, that's exactly what we're doing, supplying a shell script is another
alternative, but again, i'd like to limit the user's requirements to use the
theme as much as possible.

regards,
Peter Higgins

Hi Shane,

Shane O'Sullivan wrote:

I totally understand. I keep telling my girlfriend about how grey rocks
because grey goes well with *anything* (a lot of my clothes are grey,
and for that reason).

Thanks. I'm interested in Peter's idea for the Soria theme as a "make
your own theme" theme. I hope we can get it working with IE6.

Cheers,
Daniel.

Hi Daniel,

Customizing tundra to be blue is actually pretty straightforward, though
not as easy as it would be if css allowed for expressions and variables.

I'll see if I can whip something up to show you how in the next few days.

Regards,
- -Dylan

Daniel wrote: