Icons for various Trac link types

[kamil@…]

There's already an icon for links which point to an external URL. It would be great if icons could also be shown for other types of Trac links, for example to the source browser. I think the wiki links could remain plain text, but an indicator that you are about to be taken to the source browser by clicking a link would be a usability improvement.

[Remy Blank]

Replying to kamil@…:

but an indicator that you are about to be taken to the source browser by clicking a link would be a usability improvement.

Could you please elaborate? Personally, I don't mind if the link points to the source browser or the ticket view or even a wiki page, as long as the destination contains the information I'm looking for…

[kamil@…]

I guess I don't have an extremely strong justification. However, I find that users in our organization tend to put links inline in a natural-language sentence and link icons could provide additional context as to what is being linked to, similar to how external links work. We did something similar with a custom plugin that provided quick links to host pages in Zenoss and the additional visual indication that you're going somewhere else which is not the wiki was nice.

It's definitely one of those things that would be a nice-to-have. Maybe if you don't feel it should be in Trac proper I'll try to add it with a plugin.

[Remy Blank]

I'm not too keen on adding this by default, as I have the feeling that it would clutter the text too much.

The good news is, you probably don't even need a plugin to implement that: a CSS file should suffice. Most of the TracLinks have a class that describes the type of link, so if you want to add an icon to ticket links, you could put something like the following in your site CSS (untested):

a.ticket {
  background: url("site/ticket.png") no-repeat scroll left center;
  padding-left: 16px;
}

(I wonder why we use a nested <span> for ​external links?)

[kamil@…]

Ah, I didn't know about the class for different types of links, that makes this super easy to implement. In that case you can close this idea and I'll just add it to our CSS customization.

[Remy Blank]

Ok. Let us know if you find any links that don't have a specific class, and we will add them.