Let the people know about Tiranti

[Schwad]

In general I might do another README pass-over. But there, or wiki, or somewhere I think it would be cool to showcase tiranti to the lay-user.

Maybe there could be a section like "How we likes to Shoes" where I could talk about things we like to do that are optional. Including having debug on to see everything, and having tiranti on, and mucking around with bootswatch themes. I don't know.

[noahgibbs]

I actually think we should switch to Tiranti by default at this point. I'd love to switch to Sketchy theme by default. But I should save at least one theme in local files -- right now any Tiranti theme is downloaded from Bootswatch, and that shouldn't be true for (at least) the default theme.

[noahgibbs]

In general I like doing offline dev, so I want it working by default :-) Which, without Tiranti, it is.

[Schwad]

I actually think we should switch to Tiranti by default at this point. I'd love to switch to Sketchy theme by default.

Beyond env vars what we could do is make these the defaults. Keep the env var stuff. BUT if you pass an arg --shoes-classic then sure you have an easy way to turn off Tiranti and bootswatch etc.

But I think we're getting to a point with this project where it's okay to add our own flair onto things if we want to. But yeah a copy of something for offline-mode sounds good.

And the comms for this would be like

"scarpe foo.rb --shoes-classic gives you the true shoes-like feel for your app. If you want to scarpe like us with a bit more pizazz, try out scarpe foo.rb and live on the wild side"

[Schwad]

This starts to inject, slowly, an understanding that we are giving ourselves some creative licences. Which, over time, makes bigger things less of a shock (like exploring mobile in 2024)

[Schwad]

Also, if you bring down a local sketchy- and if we ever wanted to change any of the custom styles a bit more, it could become abbozzato which is sketchy in Italian 😂

[noahgibbs]

It could. I actually kept the Bootstrap theme names the same so it's obvious what you're getting. Translating to Italian makes it a lot harder to figure out how you'd get "Cyborg" or "Cerulean" or "Flatly", though. I think we want to keep the Bootswatch theme names.

But for the default you don't need to know a name.

[noahgibbs]

As far as some creative license, I agree. But also, there has been some change over the years in what Shoes does, and some difference from implementation to implementation of Shoes, plus difference from OS to OS. I think we definitely want to make it clear that that kind of thing can change.

And yeah, we'd keep the env vars but change the default to Tiranti. The current Tiranti default is the Sketchy theme, but it's already configurable too. We'd just need a place to put the offline files and use them first. Not too hard.

[noahgibbs]

Okay. Doing this well wants a few things. One was features/extensions. There's now a PR open for that. Another was an asset server so we could have the theme files locally. That PR is open now. Now I can move toward doing this as the default.

I'm also going to need to decide if I want to use data URLs instead for the stylesheets. That would mean big HTML pages, but would also let us not run the asset server for stylesheets (so not for literally every app.)

I'm also not 100% sure what I'm going to do for Scarpe-Wasm here. We can't really run an asset server for Scarpe-Wasm. So maybe it just always uses data URLs? That's not perfect, but it may be good enough. And it's creating the data URLs locally instead of downloading HTML for them, so it's not quite as horrible as it sounds.

[noahgibbs]

Features and extensions are merged already. We have the asset server.

Still not 100% on when/how we want to use data URLs vs asset-server URLs, but that's now easy to handle when we decide, once #495 is merged. If we do all data URLs the asset server won't spin up -- only if it's needed. But the Bootstrap code is big, so with current defaults it will use the asset server.

Scarpe-Wasm just uses Calzini, never Tiranti, for the moment. So it doesn't really have the asset server problem until/unless we upgrade. So for now that's the answer.

Once #495 is merged we could switch to Tiranti by default whenever we want. We may still want to talk about the asset URLs and how we want to manage them first.