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Prefix in android style files item names

I am new to android and have a question about the styles.xml file.
Each item for example this
<item name="android:background">#color/black</item>
works both with "android:background" and with just "background".
What is the android: prefix there for?

When creating your own styles, you should always extend an existing style from the framework or support library so that you maintain compatibility with platform UI styles. To extend a style, specify the style you want to extend with the parent attribute. You can then override the inherited style attributes and add new ones.
For example, you can inherit the Android platform's default text appearance and modify it as follows:
<style name="GreenText" parent="#android:style/TextAppearance">
<item name="android:textColor">#00FF00</item>
</style>
However, you should always inherit your core app styles from the Android Support Library.
But if you don't inherit them from the android support library then too things will work the same!
Source: Explanation text and code taken from: https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/look-and-feel/themes
You can read more about Styles and Themes from the above doc, from where I took the example to explain you!

No resource found that matches the given name: attr 'actionBarStyle'

I am trying to change the android action bar style. The minimum API support for the app is 8. So as using android:actionBarStyle attribute in the style xml file in the values folder gives the minimum required API 11 error, I have commented it out and moved it to a separate style xml file in v11 folder.
However, when using the actionBarStyle attribute only for android 2.1 and higher as mentioned in the android documentation, it gives me the No resource found error. Below is the style code:
<style name="AppTheme" parent="android:Theme.DeviceDefault">
<item name="android:typeface">monospace</item>
<!-- <item name="android:actionBarStyle">#style/MyActionBarTheme</item> -->
<!-- Support library compatibility -->
<item name="actionBarStyle">#style/MyActionBar</item>
</style>
I have tried changing the style parent theme from DeviceDefualt to Holo.Light.DarkActionBar, AppCompat.Light.DarkActionBar, etc. but the error still remains.

If you want to use the standard Action Bar on Android devices v7 appcompat library, which backports the Action Bar to any API 7+ device when you use ActionBarActivity. (Note, the Android documentation you found reference this same library, hence the 'When using the Support Library' comments throughout that document)
To add it to your project, you can follow the directions for adding a library with resources for whatever IDE you use.
Once you have the appcompat library added, you may consider using a tool like the Android Action Bar Style Generator which automatically builds the correct styles/resources needed to fully style your action bar (make sure to change the 'Style Compatibility' drop down to 'AppCompat').

Any chance to use holoeverywhere and appcompat together?

Since google released the new support library v7, I use the appcompat library instead of actionbarsherlock. With the appcompat library the actionbar still works, if I disable the recreating at orientation change (android:configChanges="orientation|screenSize|keyboardHidden"), which saves me a lot of work. But for the user experiece of android >=2.1 and <3.0 users, i would be happy, if I could continue to use holoeverywhere (which depends on ABS).
I've tried to setup ABS as library for holoeverywhere and then AppCompat and holoeverywhere as libraries for my App, but it doesn't work.
I'd appreciate your help.
EDIT:
I haven't found any solution to get them work together. But I found out, that I can use the Holo Style Generator (link) to change the drawables of most UI components (e.g. EditText etc.). After the theme is generated, you only have to change the parent style in the files from:
res/values/themes_apptheme: <style name="AppTheme" parent="android:Theme.Black">
res/values-v11/themes_apptheme: <style name="AppTheme" parent="android:Theme.Holo">
to
<style name="AppTheme" parent="#style/Theme.AppCompat">

Probably a little late now, but newer versions of HoloEverywhere come with AppCompat instead of ABS.
Personally I tend to struggle with this, as porting ABS projects to AppCompat turned out to be a pain, but there are definitely advantages of using the 'official' solution in the long run.

ActionBarSherlock with Action Bar Style Generator

for the last few days I'm trying to implement custom theme, which is created by Action Bar Style Generator to my application. I'm able to use theme with some generic samples from SDK, but I'm not able to use it with my application which uses ActionBarSherlock.
My application with ActionBarSherlock is a modified sample of Tabs and Pager.
Steps which I do:
Create theme with Android Action Bar Style Generator.
Copy theme to res folder inside my application.
Change theme in Manifest file.
After those steps only 'Action bar color' changes to correct one. All other styles are not used in application. I have tried many different approaches which I found online, but without success.
Thank you very much for your help.

Did you add the proper items to your App's theme in styles.xml? You need to use attributes that are NOT prefixed with android:, for example:
<item name="actionBarStyle">#style/Widget.Styled.ActionBar</item>
<item name="background">#drawable/bg_striped</item>
<item name="backgroundSplit">#drawable/bg_striped_split</item>
You would also keep the properly prefixed ones for Android versions that have native actionbar.
<item name="android:actionBarStyle">#style/Widget.Styled.ActionBar</item>
<item name="android:background">#drawable/bg_striped</item>
<item name="android:backgroundSplit">#drawable/bg_striped_split</item>
The best place to understand this is to look at the demo provided with the ActionBarSherlock library project.

I managed to fix the problem.
I missed android:background attribute in TabWidget. This partially
solves the problem.
I had to set setLeftStripDrawable and setRightStripDrawable programatically.

How do I style the title text in ActionBarSherlock 4.0?

Hello i use ActionBarSherlock Version 4.0.0 and i dont know how to change/style the title text, under version 3.5 i used #style/abTextStyle.
but that doenst work in version 4.0.0.

ABS 4 brought with it some major improvements, one being the styling via XML. If you read the documentation on styling, you would know that as of 4.0 -
Due to limitations in Android's theming system any theme
customizations must be declared in two attributes. The normal
android-prefixed attributes apply the theme to the native action bar
and the unprefixed attributes are for the custom implementation. Since
both theming APIs are exactly the same you need only reference your
customizations twice rather than having to implement them twice.
<style name="Theme.Styled" parent="Theme.Sherlock.Light.DarkActionBar">
<item name="actionBarStyle">#style/Widget.Styled.ActionBar</item>
<item name="android:actionBarStyle">#style/Widget.Styled.ActionBar</item>
</style>
From this we can see that the ABS item reflects the native exactly, obviously without the android prefix.
This in short means that styling the native and ABS actionbar is now much simpler and to do any styling you should follow the standard Android docs on this, and then declare the styling you want like the example above (i.e. declare twice, once for native once for ABS).
This question ActionBar text color has some examples for what you want in its top voted answer, and if you want to be comforted: it was commented on by Jake Wharton who is the genius behind ABS.