Layout testing for graphical menu

Layout testing for graphical menu

[Vesa Jääskeläinen]

Hi,

I was hoping that someone else might stand-up but as there wasn't really
interest I made a draft. This is basically using Okuji's idea of using
CSS for specifying look. I made HTML page and example CSS filling
information. And of course it looks ugly as I didn't spent too much on
tuning it.

At first layout of the page would be hard-coded to grub2 graphical menu
to make it simple, but now I would like to invite people with some
stylish touch (and free time) to try it out and pin-point possible
problems with the layout and possibly design some menu theme that could
be used as a basis for official grub2 (or at least for testing it out)
:). Please be free to use bitmaps, preferably PNG or other lossless
format (so it can be easily converted to another if needed for testing
purposes).

Contents of the HTML basicly is changeable, div tags are for now
hardcoded to be as they are specified. With a good reason that can be
changed (eg. discuss it before hand).

I haven't yet decided what kind of layout engine there would be but
something simple most likely. There is most likely need to have scroll
bar support for menuitems, haven't figured out yet how define it nicely.
Possibly there needs to be some UI components, eg. way to specify what
kind of progress bar there is, some flags for about it etc.

Final style sheet will be most likely some extension to CSS in order to
give more flexibility, but I think the common concepts should be saved
to make it easier to adapt to it.

All ideas are welcome and now would be good time to share them...

And the links are:
http://nokkau.net/~chaac/files/grub2/grub2.html
http://nokkau.net/~chaac/files/grub2/grub2.css

Thanks,
Vesa Jääskeläinen

Re: Layout testing for graphical menu

[Robert Millan]

On Sat, Oct 20, 2007 at 12:49:19AM +0300, Vesa Jääskeläinen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I was hoping that someone else might stand-up but as there wasn't really
> interest I made a draft. This is basically using Okuji's idea of using
> CSS for specifying look. I made HTML page and example CSS filling
> information. And of course it looks ugly as I didn't spent too much on
> tuning it.
> 
> At first layout of the page would be hard-coded to grub2 graphical menu
> to make it simple, but now I would like to invite people with some
> stylish touch (and free time) to try it out and pin-point possible
> problems with the layout and possibly design some menu theme that could
> be used as a basis for official grub2 (or at least for testing it out)
> :). Please be free to use bitmaps, preferably PNG or other lossless
> format (so it can be easily converted to another if needed for testing
> purposes).
> 
> Contents of the HTML basicly is changeable, div tags are for now
> hardcoded to be as they are specified. With a good reason that can be
> changed (eg. discuss it before hand).
> 
> I haven't yet decided what kind of layout engine there would be but
> something simple most likely. There is most likely need to have scroll
> bar support for menuitems, haven't figured out yet how define it nicely.
> Possibly there needs to be some UI components, eg. way to specify what
> kind of progress bar there is, some flags for about it etc.
> 
> Final style sheet will be most likely some extension to CSS in order to
> give more flexibility, but I think the common concepts should be saved
> to make it easier to adapt to it.
> 
> All ideas are welcome and now would be good time to share them...

One thing that would be nice to have is a scheme by which GRUB could
display a popup "window" such as an informative message or a boolean
query.

-- 
Robert Millan

<GPLv2> I know my rights; I want my phone call!
<DRM> What use is a phone call, if you are unable to speak?
(as seen on /.)

Re: Layout testing for graphical menu

[Marco Gerards]

Vesa Jääskeläinen <chaac@nic.fi> writes:

Hi,

> I was hoping that someone else might stand-up but as there wasn't really
> interest I made a draft. This is basically using Okuji's idea of using
> CSS for specifying look. I made HTML page and example CSS filling
> information. And of course it looks ugly as I didn't spent too much on
> tuning it.

Actually, I am still hoping you are interested in working on this! :-)

What is the state of the current framebuffer support?  Are
backgrounds, etc supported?

--
Marco

Re: Layout testing for graphical menu

[Vesa Jääskeläinen]

Marco Gerards wrote:
> Vesa Jääskeläinen <chaac@nic.fi> writes:
> 
> Hi,
> 
>> I was hoping that someone else might stand-up but as there wasn't really
>> interest I made a draft. This is basically using Okuji's idea of using
>> CSS for specifying look. I made HTML page and example CSS filling
>> information. And of course it looks ugly as I didn't spent too much on
>> tuning it.
> 
> Actually, I am still hoping you are interested in working on this! :-)
> 
> What is the state of the current framebuffer support?  Are
> backgrounds, etc supported?

I think I have a local copy that supports backgrounds. I was kinda
waiting that new menu system would take over this. But I think new plan
would be to do several iterations on it... so I might commit improved
gfxterm that supports background (and is a bit faster, though needs more
memory). Next iteration would be to replace this functionality with
improved menu/themes. That version probably will not be backwards
compatible with first iteration, but I think we can live with that.

Re: Layout testing for graphical menu

[Marco Gerards]

Vesa Jääskeläinen <chaac@nic.fi> writes:

Hi,

>>> I was hoping that someone else might stand-up but as there wasn't really
>>> interest I made a draft. This is basically using Okuji's idea of using
>>> CSS for specifying look. I made HTML page and example CSS filling
>>> information. And of course it looks ugly as I didn't spent too much on
>>> tuning it.
>> 
>> Actually, I am still hoping you are interested in working on this! :-)
>> 
>> What is the state of the current framebuffer support?  Are
>> backgrounds, etc supported?
>
> I think I have a local copy that supports backgrounds. I was kinda
> waiting that new menu system would take over this. But I think new plan
> would be to do several iterations on it... so I might commit improved
> gfxterm that supports background (and is a bit faster, though needs more
> memory). Next iteration would be to replace this functionality with
> improved menu/themes. That version probably will not be backwards
> compatible with first iteration, but I think we can live with that.

Who cares about backwards compatibility? ;-)

I am looking forwards to your patches :-)

--
Marco