ISCL Terms

---

Skinnable Components

A skinnable component is a component that supports the ISCL skinnable framework. These components can have a skin applied to them to define their appearance.

Following are some examples used to skin the reference implementation of the browser:

• SkinnableButton
• SkinnablePanel
• SkinnableLabel
• SkinnableProgressMeter
• SkinnableTabbedPanel
• SkinnableToggle

Skin

A skin is a bundle of images. Each image represents one aspect or state of a component. For example, a set of four images are used to skin a SkinnableButton. One image exists for each of the following states:

• normal
• highlighted
• pressed
• disabled

Another example is a single image used to skin a SkinnablePanel. The background image defines the panel's background.

Skin Pack

A skin pack is a set of skins designed to work together. For example, a back button may be given its appearance by a skin, but an entire browser is given its appearance by a skin pack containing skins for a back button, forward button, location bar, and so on.

SkinManager

A SkinManager is responsible for finding and loading the images for a skinnable component. Each skinnable component has a default SkinManager, preconfigured to look for a skin's images in a predefined location. For more information, see Skin and Skin Pack Details.

If this predefined location is not convenient, you can change it using the following steps:

1. Create a new SkinManager.
2. Configure it as desired.
3. Set the skinManager property of the Skinnable components to use the new custom SkinManager.

A separate SkinManager for each skin pack is typical.

Copyright 2005. ICEsoft Technologies, Inc. http://www.icesoft.com