Improving the Cappuccino Theme System

I’ve written about the Cappuccino theming system before¹ and I have a confession to make, I don’t like the current system.

Let me clarify. Being able to change every visual aspect of a view is great, but currently it’s too complex.

It’s complex because a it requires manual building, even during development. I should be able to make a change, refresh the browser and see the difference. Just like developing everything else on the web, including Objective-J.

Objective-J itself is also part of the complexity. setValue:forThemeAttribute:inState works great for small amounts of theme changes. But it becomes unreadable when changing large parts of a theme.

With all the talent in the Cappuccino community I’m sure we can work around these problems with the current system. It will however not fix the biggest issue. Designers won’t theme as long as we’re using Objective-J as our theming language.

This is a huge step backwards. Designers have been able to style websites for years using CSS. I don’t see why that isn’t possible for (Cappuccino) web applications.

Now is the time for the skeptics to say that this impossible or to hard to do. Well, as we say in Dutch, watch and shiver².

Obviously this application is a big hack, but it does show what is already possible. Imagine what we could do if we implemented this properly.

In the application I use a Javascript CSS parser. This prevents the need for a separate build phase during development. When the application is ready to be deployed, the CSS can still be build into an optimized format. CSS is also a far more readable theming language and most designers already know and use it.

Now to also get them to use Git.