[eclipse-incubator-e4-dev] CSS namespaces

[Ralf Sternberg <rsternberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

Angelo brought up CSS namespaces, I think this is an important topic 
that hasn't been discussed here yet. The question is how to specify 
custom widget types in CSS. With SWT, the widget names are unambiguous, 
but custom widgets can involve name collisions.

Using CSS namespaces would be an option, although I would then opt for 
using a default namespace for SWT to avoid clutter. The CSS could look 
like this:

  @namespace "org.eclipse.swt.widgets";
  @namespace my "my.name.space";

  Label {
    color;red;
  }

  my|Label {
    color;red;
  }

On the other hand, some frequently used SWT widgets live in 
"org.eclipse.swt.custom" (CLabel, CCombo, CTabFolder, ...), so those 
would have to be prefixed as well (which I somehow dislike):

  swtcustom|CLabel {
    color: blue;
  }

Moreover, CSS 3 is not yet widely adopted and the available parsers do 
not support it out-of-the-box.

An alternative to CSS namespaces could be some kind of mapping between 
widget classes and CSS element names.

Thoughts?

Best Regards,
Ralf

CSS 3 Namespaces: http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/CR-css3-namespace-20080523/