Adium

CreatingMessageStyles/SandBox

Among other things, This will be used as a place for Message Style documentation questions.

  • I know it is good to use a single root-level wrapper element for everything in each html file. (id="insert" is an exception.)
    • What bout Next-conte[nx]t.html files? Probably best to use single root element here too.
  • Does Header.html (and any associated css) get loaded before the normal chat html and css? Does footer.html get loaded after?
  • Does the variety of line endings matter (LF, CR, CRLF) or the file encoding matter? An ancient forum post said that it had to be LF and utf-8 encoding, but I don't know if that is accurate.

To Do List for 1.4 styles

Fix for 1.4

  • Smooth Operator
    • compact variant: do something about icon/topic conflict in groupchats?

Fix for 1.4.x

  • Add styling for twitter_actions
  • Gone Dark
    • improve header toggling?
    • create sendercolor variant (easy)
    • losing focus mid-message isn't indicated.
  • minimal_mod
    • improve header toggling?
  • Smooth Operator
    • needs a new way to hide headers. The current "opacity" method prevents the selection of chat text behind it.
    • Improve handling of header when no icon is available? Maybe reclaim space or something else? Should classic use placeholder? Should others?
    • Modularize the css.
    • Header/topic need hideIcons/showIcons styling, but requires that show/hide icons keyword works in header
    • The min-width for indented bubbles should be less than non-indented ones. Ideally, everything would be min-width some em value, but the indentations are by px. I can't calculate indents for em+px. Last I checked, indent by em didn't work because icons are a fixed size and scaling them didn't work well. using px for min-width wouldn't scale well for larger font sizes, but maybe people with large fonts don't have small windows?
    • Compact variant history needs some way to distinguish sender from text besides bold. If the first word is bold, it's hard to tell. For example, in IRC, I've seen "Cappuccino trac: Ticket #119..." where "Cappuccino trac" is bold.
    • Put the "Message History" generated content at the bottom of the message history (where it's more likely to be seen and more effectively acts as a separator). See Mockie for implementation ideas.
    • Add special status formatting.
    • Add File Transfer Requests
    • Disable all-by-sender depresses on right-click, double-click, click-drag, etc.
    • Dark variant
    • RTL variant
  • Renkoo
    • improve header toggling

Fix for 1.5

  • Gone Dark
    • Complete rewrite
  • Renkoo
    • Complete rewrite
    • Create sendercolor variant?

I'm also going to use this as a temporary index for files created under CreatingMessageStyles. Eventually CreatingMessageStyles will be rewritten as an index to the various pieces of documentation and the current content of that page will be a renamed MessageStyleReferenceSheet or something like that.

Here's  another tutorial (for reference).

I've also started a page for anyone who is updating an existing message style. Basically, it's a short list of everything we want people to consider before submitting a style, whether brand new or an incremental update. I think this would be a good supplemental checklist for anyone moderating message style submissions.

Page last modified by mathuaerknedam, 3 months ago