Skinning

Objectives

Enable internal designers to more easily customize the look of Second Life
Enable external developers and residents to save customizations and prepare skin "packages"

Objective: Make the XUI files less verbose and more readable
Create 'templates.xml' file with default attributes for each widget type
- Other templates for common attribute sets can also be declared here
- Widgets can declare a tempate (default to the default one for that type)
Remove all default values from the code (code cleanup)
Create a tool to process all existing .xui files and write out only the non default values
- Clean up the XML output at the same time

Objective: Remove any UI art from the code
Remove programmatic art with attributes, e.g. volume sliders
Remove any backgrounds from icons, etc (use alpha)
Ensure that all images can be cropped and scaled
Allow specification of fixed size borders (i.e. so that button graphics with narrow boarders scale correctly)
Enable additional attributes to widgets for colors, etc

Objective: Make it easier to see the effects of XUI edits
Enable reloading of all floaters including the menus and overlay bar
Ensure all floaters can handle missing UI elements and will behave reasonably or refuse to open with an appropriate message

Objective: enable menus and overlay bar to be more easily customized
Create a global floater/panel map and have floaters/panels to specify their type (e.g. "floater_inventory" -> LLFloaterInventory) in XML
Allow buttons to open floaters by name
- Include support for opening a specific tab
- Differentiate between toggling state of singletons, showing/focusing, and opening new instances
Allow menus to be expanded/collapsed for simple/advanced usage
Specify layout of overlay bar and menu bar in "viewer.xml"
- Allow multiple "overlay bars" to be added so that side bars or corner panels with buttons can be added

Objective: enable external developers and residents to preserve changes across updates and distribute custom UI layouts
Allow residents to save changes to a user local directory (i.e. Documents and Settings\User\Application Data\SecondLife\skins)
Allow residents to package changes and easily distribute them for easy installation by other users
- Define location to search for installed skin packages
- Include the ability to change skins and restore the original skin

Make iconic panels (i.e.. build tools) generally available
- Combination of fully iconic buttons and the ability for a button to open a specific tab in a floater