[Qt-qml] Fw: Why can't I stylesheet a font?

[warwick.allison at nokia.com]

> When I refer to "hard coding" I refer to fonts, colors and pixel sizes.
> I don't think that qualifies as making something sterile, just theme-able.
> The fonts and colors are user-specified, the pixel sizes (and font sizes) should be
> calculated to allow for different screen resolutions.

That's what sterilizes it. If a designer is required to make their application be able to use any color and font chosen by the user at any size calculated by some programmer's algorithm, then they may as well give up design as an art form and go become a house painter.

> Otherwise you have to
> redevelop your application for every screen aspect ratio...

You've nearly got it. Keep following exactly that chain of thought, and consider how easy it is in QML to redesign an app for a different target platform.

I've walked this path of discovery, as have quite a few others that have experienced QML, certainly those of us that come from the engineering side of GUI development. Many of us were there in the 1980s and 90s building exactly that generic themeable infrastructure I derided. But it's purpose was ultimately to help non-designers produce code that resulted in reasonably non-ugly designs that could then have a limited "theme" applied by a designer to try to make all applications magically look good together. I think we reached the limit of that paradigm about 10 years ago.

Now, when you look around at modern and beautiful UIs, you see that Design Comes First, and it does so on an *application* basis. There may be style guides that help with certain parts of the UI, even helpful predefined elements for the boring bits (eg. settings dialogs). But the bulk of any beautiful UI is a fully designed whole.

As detronizator suggests, the web and the amount of visual design it (eventually) allowed was a major force in this change - companies who had created a design language for their corporate media wanted that same language used on their web site, not some flunky user-decides-the-color mess (black on grey was the original NCSA Mosaic colors - the first web pages with a white background looked awesome). Many websites today are quite "static" in their design. Good ones are flexible enough in their layout to survive reasonable window resizing, but try hit them with your own CSS "theme" and you're sure to make a mess.

CSS is used in the development of the web sites - it's a great tool for communicating parts of the design in a programmatic way, and to return to the beginning of this thread, it's something that needs exploring. But not as a means of allowing post-design hacking of a UI, or of defining values that are then *variables* for the designer to suffer.

--
Warwick