Featherers gather ’round. I’m working on a branch task, but I think it helps illustrate the direction we want to head in with our CSS. The purpose of the Plucked is to use a little as possible from our Feathers, and rely primarily on the operating system’s native chrome package in xulrunner. There are a couple of things to know about this lack-of-feathers for those of you who want to roll your own.

Plucked is pulled together from mainwin.css, mainwin_images.css, dialog.css and mini.css. We have overridden or augmented xulrunner’s existing chrome packages. If you have a build installed, you can find these style rules and images in compiled\dist\xulrunner\chrome\classic.jar. They’re basically all the things xulrunner uses to display its UI. If you don’t want xulrunner to use its default style rules, you have to expressly say so in your CSS. -moz-appearance: none !important; This tells xulrunner to not use its existing chrome package. We do this relentlessly for Rubberducky which allows for as much freedom as there are details.

If you do use this technique, be aware that you will also lose any “stock” styles being provided by xulrunner. That said, if you want something to show up at all, you HAVE to specify it in your CSS. Without any default styles, your element will appear with a height and width of 0. Our XBL widgets do not have default xulrunner styles so they must be explicitly accounted for. Plucked attempts to do this basic accounting of the items in Songbird’s main window. It specifies basic styles for our widgets, the smartsplitter, the seekbar and search widget.

Here’s what it looks like so far:

What’s next? Non-flickering hovers? transparent buttons? nO wAY.