Hi,
First, it seems that "style" and "stylesheet" are interchangeable. True? Is one of them preferred? It seems to me that it is best to use "style" to avoid confusion with CSS in the web world.
I've been working on a desktop application and have used the "Alpha Five Default" style, figuring it would be a good default choice. I've left most things (like font and background color) unchanged from the values supplied by the style, but in a few places I needed to tweak things, for example to differentiate between two types of fields.
All was fine and everything looked good until I tried running the application on a customer machine. All the colors were different, it looked awful, and in some cases had things like black text with a black background. I figured out that the problem was that the Alpha Five Default style uses Windows colors for everything, and if the user changes their Windows color scheme, the Alpha Five screens would change as well, and not always in a pleasing way.
So now I'm changing everything to use a modified version of the "Light Modern" style, which appears to use fixed colors for everything so it will always look as I intend. I'm hoping I won't encounter any more surprises.
Is my understanding of this stuff correct? Do you have any suggestions to follow when managing styles? Any gotchas that I should be watching out for? Is this stuff in the documentation somewhere (I couldn't find it).
My hope is that this request will generate a discussion which will be a useful resource for others.
Thank you.
-jimc
First, it seems that "style" and "stylesheet" are interchangeable. True? Is one of them preferred? It seems to me that it is best to use "style" to avoid confusion with CSS in the web world.
I've been working on a desktop application and have used the "Alpha Five Default" style, figuring it would be a good default choice. I've left most things (like font and background color) unchanged from the values supplied by the style, but in a few places I needed to tweak things, for example to differentiate between two types of fields.
All was fine and everything looked good until I tried running the application on a customer machine. All the colors were different, it looked awful, and in some cases had things like black text with a black background. I figured out that the problem was that the Alpha Five Default style uses Windows colors for everything, and if the user changes their Windows color scheme, the Alpha Five screens would change as well, and not always in a pleasing way.
So now I'm changing everything to use a modified version of the "Light Modern" style, which appears to use fixed colors for everything so it will always look as I intend. I'm hoping I won't encounter any more surprises.
Is my understanding of this stuff correct? Do you have any suggestions to follow when managing styles? Any gotchas that I should be watching out for? Is this stuff in the documentation somewhere (I couldn't find it).
My hope is that this request will generate a discussion which will be a useful resource for others.
Thank you.
-jimc