Specify how icon re-coloring should be done
GNOME, KDE, and possibly others implement support for re-coloring icons in our icon loader implementations, allowing the same icon to be re-colored as needed for dark themes (or in KDE's case, for arbitrary color schemes). This is not specified in the spec, and doing so would likely be useful to standardize.
In KDE, we embed CSS stylesheets into our SVG icons, and our icon loader implementation re-colors such icons at runtime.
In GNOME, icons named with -symbolic
are recognized at runtime as being recolorable by the icon loader implementation, which does so.
Being a KDE guy, I obviously prefer our implementation, as it allows recolorability to be baked into the icons themselves so apps don't need to ask for differently-named icons. It also preserves the ability to use the -symbolic
suffix to be reserved for other purposes. [1]
With GNOME lacking interest in icon theming topics, I might humbly suggest that our implementation be considered for addition to the spec.
[1] In KDE we are moving towards using -symbolic
to signify that the app wants a symbolic version of an icon if such a version is available but there's also a full-color version at the requested size that would otherwise be returned instead. This is useful for icon themes with symbolic and full-color icons and icons that use different styles at different sizes, while being fully backwards-compatible for themes that have only symbolic or only full-color icons.