Skinning WAS Change the Green Online Icon to an Icon reflecting the IM Protocol?

[Ethan Blanton]

Chris Forsythe spake unto us the following wisdom:
> Good, so I guess this leads to the next question I had, which is, what
> would it take for Pidgin to load Adium Xtras, with the current Xtra
> formats?

Well, that's a good question.

Emoticon themes could be pretty easily handled from within Pidgin, if
we simply understood the Adium format; we don't.

Widget themes and icon themes are currently handled in Pidgin via the
Gtk+ mechanisms for each.  These can also be configured from within
Pidgin (the Gtk+ Theme Configuration plugin does precisely this), and
so a mechanism could be created which read Adium Xtras themes and
poked their values into Gtk+ as appropriate; this is likely to be
somewhat more fragile than emoticons (as we don't make all the rules,
in that case), and one would have to be very careful not to create Bad
Interactions with the basic underlying Gtk+ theme.

Generally speaking, I think these things should be solved where they
live, which means that the Gtk+ stuffs should be configured by Gtk+;
this would mean making Gtk+ understand Adium widget themes, I guess.

Note however that Adium's widget themes are *far less* flexible than
Gtk+ widget themes in many ways, and what looks good in a buddy list
may or may not look good in other dialogs and windows.  This may be an
argument for handling Adium themes inside Pidgin, and restricting
their effect to the widgets which comprise the buddy list.

As far as conversation styles ... that has been discussed, and I think
all are in agreement that GtkIMHtml should eventually be replaced by
webkit.  When that happens, they should Just Work, to my
understanding.

Ethan

-- 
The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws [that have no remedy
for evils].  They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor
determined to commit crimes.
		-- Cesare Beccaria, "On Crimes and Punishments", 1764
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