Re: Re: Re: Re: Separating parts
Gary wrote:
Mike wrote:
The old css-files were almost unreadable, and the new ones are worse.
Have you looked at the CSS files for the Kubrick and Planetfall themes?
I tried to organize them more coherently and add more useful comments.
Gary, I am sure you have done a great job with the new themes, but I counted the different colours used in the theme Kubrick:
[colors snipped]
- over 70 different colours. I find that overwhelming.
Yes, and it isn't even a very colorful theme. 
Part of the reason for the large number is that many people have worked on various parts of Tiki and set colors as they please for their own work. These are often "minor" elements like the border color around a particular class of box or text select gadget or something, or a new Tiki feature that is given its own styles. Sometimes I just copied these into the Kubrick style sheet (after checking the colors to make sure they were generally compatible) rather than changing them to match a limited number of colors in a Kubrick pallet.
This is rather lazy on my part — a new theme should have a pallet specified at the beginning and then all colors to be used should come from that pallet rather than some being pasted in from another style.
But in my opinion the main benefit of this, in itself, would be visual, rather than in reducing style sheet size. All color designations in CSS are the same byte size, so if a page element needs to be given a color style, it doesn't matter — from a file size perspective — if the color is the same as others or unique. But this reflects the problem of Tiki's CSS complexity.
A stylesheet reduction/simplification could be done and would be beneficial if a general color setting would be set and then exceptions be very limited. This is done already, of course, but, for example, link colors are also set for cases where the background color is different or otherwise are a special case. If the link color variation is needed, fine, otherwise the general case should hold and specific specifications should be eliminated.
Following your cue, I checked the Kubrick theme for instances of color being specified. Colors were specified over 300 times. This reflects the general over-specificity of Tiki CSS files, and even after I tried to trim the selectors down.
The Snow theme, which I am just finishing now, has "only" 116 or so color specifications, so maybe progress is being made. 
Definitely work needs to be done on this. Even with all its features, there's no reason Tiki needs to have such huge CSS files.
-- Gary
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