[CLOSED] [Themes] Should themes be restricted to just styling inside the editor area?

[core-ai-bot]

Issue by peterflynn
Tuesday Jul 15, 2014 at 22:10 GMT
Originally opened as adobe/brackets#8415

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When we talked about themes in backlog grooming, there was agreement on the core team that it shouldn't be officially supported for themes to restyle any UI outside the editor area. Otherwise we'd have to treat every tiny DOM change in the Brackets UI as a breaking UI change... and all themes that touch broader UI would have to be responsible for keeping up with every single UI addition or change Brackets makes each sprint.

I'd originally thought ThemeManager actually enforces this, but it turns out I was wrong -- that was just a misunderstanding of how lessifyTheme() works. It does wrap each theme in a root CSS class, but it turns out that's just used to enable/disable themes. (Side issue: this seems inefficient once many themes are loaded. We should probably use <style disabled='true'> or just create/delete style tags instead).

We could modify this wrapping so it's impossible for themes to affect things outside the editor area -- e.g. wrapping it in an #editor-holder or .CodeMirror selector. (This would still allow themes to affect inline UI such as inline editors and gutter annotations, but that's probably sensible anyway).

Do we want to enforce it that directly? If not, what documentation should we use to strongly discourage themes from going outside those bounds?