Since we had the luxury of having several people in the office, Trevor, Juliusz, Rob Moen, Ed Sanders, Shahyar, May, Monte and I sat down to talk about the problem we currently have of having no standard way to create icons. Here is my write up of this meeting, again, if you attended please add/correct me on anything and if you were not please ask for clarification where needed.
Currently we have two modes of creating icons in MediaWiki 1) Using a font 2) Using SVGs with PNG fallbacks and the markup varies depending on what extension you look at.
We discussed both approaches and advantages and disadvantages of each. One of the major disadvantages of the WikiFont is the additional HTTP request it creates to download the font and cannot be embedded in the stylesheet using data uris like SVGs can (due to URL size restrictions).
One of the major advantages of WikiFont is you can design a grayscale icon, and style it using font colour. Shahyar was happy to move Flow to using SVG based fonts if we could build grayscale SVGs and change their colours using ResourceLoader. One concrete example is when you have an icon used in a constructive anchor. The icon needs to be green, but when hovered over a lighter green.
Another advantage brought up by May was that currently she finds it much easier to build icons in this way, and that having to maintain separate coloured versions of the SVGs is a pain point to her.
We decided that we should push towards using SVGs that can be built into fonts for the purpose of the app.
As next steps 1) Monte to explore using SVGs in the Wikipedia apps. He will create font from SVGs. He will work with May to ensure her workflow is as easy as before.
2) Trevor is going to look into how we can automatically generate different colour versions of SVGs and automatically create PNGs from them.
3) I am going to aim to agree on a standard icon HTML markup for mediawiki ui. We still have an issue with the fact that everyone is using different HTML markup to create icons. After reviewing all our current approaches [1] it was clear that we were relatively closely aligned and that it simply is a case of agreeing on class names.
We aim to get all the above done by Sept 15th, 2014 so please poke us on the mailing list if you haven't had a follow up then.
Full disorganised notes can be found here [2].
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Icon_standardisation [2] http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/Icon_standardisation