Window Managers and other stuff

[Jonathan Bartlett <johnnyb wolfram com>]

Why is gnome using WM hints for all of its window-manager integration?
Wouldn't it be better to simply have all of that stuff in CORBA interfaces
so anyone can listent that wants to?  That way we could do lots of nifty
things, like:

Allow any program to display a user's panel menus
Allow a user to use a non-gnome-compliant window manager, but just have
helper apps that accomplish the same thing (by listening to the CORBA
interfaces).

This way, noone has to wait until Window Manager X supports the spec, they
just have to download a little helper app.  

This could be of benefit in another area as well - Application Menus.  You
could offload the drawing of menus to the WM, or to whatever helper app
wants to draw them.  That way, you could configure the crap out of them
easily, and the GNOME team doesn't even have to program it.  The WM could
display menus at the top like Macs, or on every application, or wherever
it feels like.  If the WM doesn't support this, then the user just has to
download a helper app (well, I gues a default one would be nice) to
display the menus instead of the WM.  Does this sound reasonable?

Jon