GnomeMDI

[Seth Aaron Nickell <snickell Stanford EDU>]

Just a note... Window in Window MDI is considered an extremely ineffective 
interface. The industry trend is to move away from it. If I'm correct, 
Microsoft Visual Studio is the only actively developed Microsoft 
application that still uses this interface, and I'm not even sure visual 
studio does. Office recently ditched mdi altogether (at least by 
default). Tabs are considered better UI when MDI is actually necessary 
(its probably better to avoid MDI altogether, though there's some 
disagreement about this). 

I would strongly discourage us from expending programmer effort on window 
in window MDI. A better pursuit might be to try and improve task grouping 
so its easier to use. This has similar benefits to window in window MDI, 
but doesn't produce some of the confusion problems (not to mention the 
necessity for every MDI application to have a window handling interface).

-Seth