Re: wm-spec broken?

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

I agree. See:

 http://mail.gnome.org/archives/wm-spec-list/2000-September/msg00037.html

Though no fix for that ever got incorporated into the spec.
(I think we need to start using a bug tracker to track things
like this for future versions.)

I guess one question is what are people doing currently for this?

The spec is clearly broken, but if there is a defacto understanding
of what was meant, then we may need to use that, rather than
fixing it up based on what would make the most sense.

Regards,
                                        Owen

Alexander Larsson <alla lysator liu se> writes:

> I'm currently implementing the _NET_WM_ICON part of the wm-spec, and I'm
> having problems deciphering the spec.
> 
> Here is what is says:
> --------------------------------
> _NET_WM_ICON
> 
>  _NET_WM_ICON CARDINAL[][2+n]/32
> 
> This is an array of possible icons for the client. This specification does
> not stipulate what size these icons should be, but individual desktop
> environments or toolkits may do so. The Window Manager MAY scale any of
> these icons to an
> appropriate size. 
> 
> This is an array of 32bit packed CARDINAL ARGB with high byte being A, low
> byte being B. First two bytes are width, height. Data is in rows, left to
> right and top to bottom. 
> ---------------------------------
> 
> This seems to say I should pack my data like this: 
>  a << 24 | r << 16 | g << 8 | b
> in host byte-order, and this will be byteswapped to network byte-order
> by xlib.
> 
> It also says that the first two *bytes* are width and height. How can I
> pack two bytes before an array of 32 bit integers and expect byte-swapping
> to work?