As part of my work on notification watch buttons I’d like to introduce new icons related to the bell icon, namely the followings:
| Proposed Name | Silk | Font Awesome | Glyphicon |
|---|---|---|---|
| bell-slash |  |
 |
|
| bell-empty |  |
 |
|
| bullhorn |  |
 |
There’s a missing icon for silk for bullhorn. What is displayed in silk in this case? We need something. Same problem for glyphicon for bell-slash and bell-empty.
So for me it’s a -1 until we have all mappings for silk at least (and glyphicon ideally). Now re the bullhorn. AFAIU you’ll use it for “custom notifications”. Why not use the bell icon too in this case and thus remove the need to introduce a bullhorn?
If we want to continue having the concept of icon sets, we need to find mappings for other icon sets. See https://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Icon%20Theme%20Application#HIconList
Regarding the name bell-slash I’m not sure because a slash is in the other direction normally (what is displayed is a backslash). Now maybe there’s a known naming convention for using the slash terminology. Another possibility is bell-disabled. EDIT: it seems slash is what is used by FA, see Find the Perfect Icon for Your Project | Font Awesome
Thx
I think it would be nice if the icon names wouldn’t just say what the icon depicts but would say more what the intention of the icon is. This would make it much easier to replace it by a different icon in another icon theme.
For example, what’s bell-slash vs. bell-empty and when would I use them as opposed to the bell icon? An icon like not-following or custom-notifications would be much easier to use and replace in my opinion and would avoid that we use the same icon in different contexts.
Regarding the Silk mappings, I think we should either go forward with making Font Awesome the fallback icon theme, or we should create a custom Silk-style icon. But again, the problem here is that the icon’s name doesn’t convey in any way how it is used and thus makes it impossible to replace easily. If this was following-custom, we could, e.g., combine a bell with either a wrench or a pencil to denote that the notifications were customized.
Just reminded me that we added https://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Documentation/DevGuide/FrontendResources/Icons/#HIconnamingconvention recently but indeed we didn’t discuss the naming semantics.
There are pros and cons of what you propose. If we use a name that says the intention then it’s a lot harder to reuse for other use cases. Basically it means introducing a lot more icons (one for each use case) and duplicates. Which could be fine, as the pro is indeed that it makes it easier to map to other icon sets.
If we agree about this, then there’s the migration discussion that we need to have as we would need to deprecate icon names, introduce a lot new ones and handle potential naming clashes. I guess a first step would be to try to come up with a sample proposal to see how it would look like.
Thx
1 Like
Yes I still need to find something for that one, right now I haven’t found any good substitute, I’m taking ideas.
Is it really an issue? We have plenty of missing mapping for glyphicons, I didn’t know those were mandatory. See https://design.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Proposal/XWiki%20Icon%20Set
I need 4 icons for the 4 different states of the watch (followed / blocked / not set / custom) the bullhorn is used for “custom”.
Yes I basically reused the FA names here. Now I’m fine with bell-disabled.
Yes, this to be discussed (to decide what we must do when adding a new icon) but ideally we shouldn’t break the contrib extensions and offer possible mappings as a proof that some meaningful ones can be found (see https://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Icon%20Theme%20Application#HIconList which lists glyhicons, material and FA 5).
I know but I was questioning the need to have different icons. They are not different states: both followed and custom are the same state, they’re just a different config and could have the same icon (they’re differentiated by the text anyway). I personally don’t understand the bullhorn icon for custom vs the bell for “followed”.
If custom always means that the page is being followed, then I agree that the same icon can be used. But if I remember correctly, when talking to @surli, is that custom can be blocking notifications as well, it depends on what’s set on the filters in settings.
Regarding the bullhorn icon, while I personally don’t like it very much, I also don’t have a better option given we have to support the same icon in different sets.