Development/Guidelines

KDE standards are the guidelines used internally, related to UI design and consistency. The section about policies also contains standards-like documents that relate to developer activity.

Human Interface Guidelines

Accessibility and Usability Checklists: Test your application for accessibility/usability along these checklists

Community Identity Guidelines (CIG): Definitions and recommendations which help the KDE Project to establish a unique, characteristic, and appealing design.

Plasma Interface Guidelines (PIG): This document is a place to collect all the "do"s, "don't"s and "how to"s for interface elements in Plasma, particularly applets and plasmoids.

KDE4 Human Interface Guidelines (HIG)

Old Guidelines

The following links contain information that has not yet been been copied into the Human Interface Guidelines.

Draft: KDE4 Human Interface Guidelines (HIG): A draft for KDE Human (was: User) Interface Guidelines for KDE 4.x. These guidelines are under construction, but should be your first reference (followed by checking the KDE3 User Interface Guidelines or asking questions on the usability mailinglist: [email protected]).

KDE3 User Interface Guidelines: The KDE User Interface Guidelines for 3.x.

KDE2 User Interface Guidelines: The KDE User Interface Guidelines for 2.x.

KDE KControl Module Guidelines: Styleguide standards for KConfig Modules used in combination with KControl.

Supported Standards

This section contains information about the industry and de facto standards used or implemented by KDE (for instance, we use the XML standard to write XML documents, and we implement the Window Manager Hint standard with KWin).

XML: The Extensible Markup language. KOffice's document formats are applications of this. It is also used as configuration file format by an increasing number of KDE programs.

DOM: The Document Object Model as defined by the W3C. Qt's QDom*classes are modeled after this.

XDND: The specification for the inter-application drag and drop protocol used by Qt and Gtk. Meanwhile, several other applications use it.

Extended Window Manager Hint Standard: Also called NETWM or EWMH, the protocol for window manager interaction, supported by many window manager authors.

Desktop Entry Specification: The format of .desktop files, supported by KDE.

Icon Naming Standard: The Freedesktop naming standard for icons, supported by KDE.

MIME types: Files types (as used to show appropriate icons in the file manager and to categorize data in drag & drop and clipboard operations) follow the convention known as MIME. Here you can find a list of registered content types.

URL: Uniform resource locators, defined by RFC 1738.

SM: The X11R6.4 session management protocol. This is the backend protocol for KMainWindow's high-level session management features.

iCalendar: RFC 2445 - Internet Calendaring and Scheduling Core Object Specification (iCalendar). This is used to store KOrganizer and KTimeTracker (KArm in KDE < 4) data.