[OpenLayers-Users] Intuitive and good looking icons

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 03:24:08PM -0500, Heidt, Christopher M. wrote:
> I believe the best way to handle this is to throughly look into how we
> can make it as easy as possible to customize the ui.  If it were truly
> an all css solution i think most of this type of issue would
> disappear.

Yes. I've been pushing this effort forward to some extent every release.
Recently, we added the PanPanel and ZoomPanel controls, and
http://docs.openlayers.org/library/controls#id1 now uses them as
examples on how to style panels, along with
http://docs.openlayers.org/library/controls#customizing-an-existing-panel
.

The LayerSwitcher and OverviewMap controls are the only ones which are
not easily customizable in the same fashion and still need work in this
regard. 

> The problem for me as a developer is that im smart enough to dig
> through the js and figure out the css names and how to get tooltips
> going, etc. but i never sit down and compile a list of customizations
> and say "can/should this be easier?".

You shouldn't need to do this as a *user* of OpenLayers -- but need to
for historical reasons.
http://trac.openlayers.org/browser/trunk/openlayers/theme/default/style.css
is pretty easy to read, and can be used to control the style of pretty
much any control added since OpenLayers 2.4 (and several added earlier).
The documentation of how to use this was improved just this weekend (see
the links above), but there are holdovers from old code which need
upgrading to the new style of controls in order to allow easy
customizability.  

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta