Why multiple theme approach?

[mpolichette]

Hey guys, I am glad to see a good attempt at creating a select2 and selectize angular component. However I'm confused by the approach to have multiple themes/templates.

Since some of the components functionality is stored in the templates (hide/show etc..) it seems like it would be a better approach to get a consistent template down and then add CSS to style to get the bootstrap/select2/selectize look.

I would guess having multiple templates/themes the way it is currently done would add unnecessary complexity and bloat to the project. This is especially the case with the bower release, where you are forced to send ALL themes to the browser because they're bundled with the code.

Is there a reason that approach was not tried or abandoned?

Anyway, thanks for the valiant efforts so far!

[dimirc]

Actually I tend to agree with the "unnecessary complexity and bloat to the project" and I even open #175 about dropping support of one of the themes because of it. The original idea was to use the same CSS of the different libraries but I started to have more trouble that help with that.

The idea of having just one template and maybe just some optionals CSS files might be interesting to check.

[mpolichette]

I really like the goal and approach of this project. If there is buy in on this idea, I'd love to get involved to try and resolve down.

Personally It would be great if there was a very basic set of CSS to include which would setup basic layout. E.G. the off screen stuff and tags falling within the text field. After that it would be optional to add styling to make it fit bootstrap/select2/etc...

Then, if it is within the scope of the project, we could even include those styles. Or maybe a quick how-to for using less/sass to @include or @extend your favorite framework's stylesheet's mixins onto ui-select's styles.

[dimirc]

Would be nice if you could open a basic PR and we can start testing the idea.

[dimirc]

Each time I'm more in favor to go ahead with this approach of having just one main template. @ProLoser what do you think of this?

[ProLoser]

Yeah I didn't realize this was being implemented as everything merged together. That completely defeats the point. I was hoping to see things like the CSS split up into each respective theme file, there was not supposed to be one file that combined all of them together.

In fact, the distribution is wrong too. This should have been getting concattenated into multiple versions such as ui-select, ui-select-bootstrap, ui-select-2, ui-select-selectize or something like that. Packaging it all together was not something I ever expected to see.

Really, the only thing people get by using different themes is a different appearance and not a whole lot more, so I'm on board with dropping the multi-html approach and just writing new CSS.

HOWEVER!

I do NOT like the idea of actually packaging the CSS together with anything else. We can provide a base stylesheet that contains nothing more than positional fixes (no padding/margins/colors/highlights/etc). Then in separate CSS files (one for each theme) you would have ALL the styling for each version. I would prefer to give people a completely unstyled base to work from if they choose to forego a theme altogether.

[mpolichette]

My issue was answered.