Content-type icons in Plone 5

Folks,

What's the skinny on UX decisions related to content-type icons in
Plone 5?  Where/when are they appropriate and where are they not?

I get the sense that the answer is more subtle than the apparent
all-or-nothing between Plone-4-baroque (if you could call 16px sprites
gaudy) and Plone-5-minimalism (glyph-wielding revolutionaries storming
the castle).

My $0.02:

* It should be possible with configuration check-boxes (site settings)
for a site to opt-in to displaying content-type icons in ANY
combination of the following three contexts:

 (1) Navigation portlet  (default: disabled)

 (2) Add menu (toolbar, default: disabled)

 (3) Structure pattern / folder contents (default: enabled).


* In more detail:

  * Ship Plone 4 OOTB content type sprites, for ease and lack of
anything better?

  * JSON for folder contents need not specify icon, but it might be
nice to specify portal_type in addition to Type.

  * Only load CSS for individual icons or sprites when necessary,
configured.  The page-load burden of sprites and CSS should not be
borne by sites that don't use it.

  * Force add-on types to use CSS to declare display of icons, do not
use content_icon in FTI.

  * Use "icons-on" class in respective places in the DOM, and have CSS
(loaded, only if necessary) override default glyphs with sprites or
images.

  * Fall-back to glyph (somehow) if icon not available for a type?


I know that the intranet/extranet users I support would want content
type icons in folder contents and navigation portlet, but would likely
not care about the add menu (and I think they clutter the toolbar).  I
just want to be able to opt-in to that, and I suspect others will want
the same choices available.

Thoughts?


Sean

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