Hello!
Context
XWiki standard flavor bundles two icon themes, Silk and Font Awesome 4 (FA).
The handling of the XWiki Iconset was done on a whim until recently. Adding icons to the XWiki Iconset would assume those icons had a mapping in Silk, FA, Glyphicon and Material Design.
In the past year I updated and hopefully improved a bit the documentation of icons in XWiki at https://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Documentation/DevGuide/FrontendResources/Icons/ .
The question of what iconThemes do we support arose in a recent forum discussion, after discussion on the live chat, we found out that we hadn’t yet made a clear decision on this.
PS: For reference sake, here’s a discussion about deprecating Silk we had last year.
Proposal
We should explicitely list the icon themes we support.
I propose to support the Silk and Font Awesome 4 iconThemes.
Explanation/Opinion
This means that we explicitely do not support Glyphicon and Material Design. This means that we could add icons to the XWiki Iconset that do not have a good mapping to Glyphicon and Material Design.
My opinion is that we had a very loose way to handle the XWiki IconSet in the past, it worked well and we shouldn’t constrain ourselves too much by having a lot of supported iconThemes with 100% mapping. I initially tried to update the doc in order to reduce technical debt and improve the quality/consistency of our icon system, but I don’t think adding a lot of constraints on it is something we want.
Conclusion
Do you agree with this proposal?
Thank you for your interest in this topic!
Lucas C.