[Epiphany] Re: Window placement

["David Adam Bordoley" <bordoley msu edu>]

Osma Ahvenlampi writes: 

> On Mon, 2003-05-05 at 22:30, David Adam Bordoley wrote:
>> Just for the record I completely disagree with putting this in the window 
>> manager for the simple reason that saving window position in a document 
>> oriented way requires a full blown metadata system (which we have) and that 
>> a wm will never have.
> 
> Without going through the wm-spec-list archives, I think that would have
> been the main point of the thread there (mentioned in those metacity
> bugs). What Havoc ultimately wants is richer metadata between apps and
> the WM in order to do this properly for apps that can't accept what
> functionality WMs can provide today.

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/wm-spec-list/2003-January/msg00008.html
has the proposed spec (more or less) according to this email 

"The biggest problem I had when saving window state is trying to find a
unique way to identify a window.  I eventually came up with an internal
numbering system.  Windows are identified by class/name/role/number
where number is simply an integer which grows as similar windows are
placed on the same virtual desktop.  This seems to work very well." 

However this will break once you start saving document location per
document (instead of based on applications, if we ever get to the panacea 
which is a document oriented ui), since documents can be renamed (but their 
position should still remain the same). Ideally every single document's 
window position should be saved per document. In epiphany's case, this will 
never work for the main window, since the title changes based on the viewed 
content, but I've already asserted that the main window is special and its 
position should probably not be saved. 

> 
> Regardless, I don't think Epiphany can be considered to fall into that
> category. It's not Nautilus, and window positions are unlikely to be
> needed on a per-bookmark basis. Certainly won't work if the current
> implementation of keeping them in a couple of GConf keys isn't changed
> to something way larger.

We don't use gconf at all to save state (except for one small case of the 
selected node in the bookmarks window and thats a bug). All state info is 
saved using  ephy-state in an xml format using ephy-node. If you buy the
notion of spatial orientation than property window locations should be saved 
per property window. (and in fact seth suggested this for nautilus property 
windows as well, but no one has implemented it yet). 

> 
> I agree with Marco that for the short term, something like what we have
> now is ok, until metacity has the window placement support. However, it
> should only remember size, not position, for the main browser window, as
> right now multiple windows open right on top of each other, which
> totally sucks. The other windows aren't opened multiple times, so
> remembering position as well should be ok.

I agree with you on this, but this problem is mainly do to the way users 
interact with browsers, and may change in the future as web browser ui's 
change to meet a changing internet. 

dave