Re: Adjusting the 2.4 schedule (cursors)

[Keith Packard <keithp keithp com>]

Around 10 o'clock on Jun 25, Owen Taylor wrote:

> Should accessible descriptions be part of the cursor theme? 
> We have some prior art for how that would work with the icon theme
> which allows for a localizable name for icons.

The most important thing is to provide some kind of semantic 'hook' on
which other things can be layered; right now there's no semantic content to
cursors at all.  I think each cursor type should have a (standard) ISO
Latin-1 name that can be seen through the X server.

With standard names, the connection to localized descriptions can be made 
outside the cursor files themselves, but of course non-standard cursors 
should be allowed to include localized descriptions as well.

> This is sounding definitely like 2.6 material to me, though the
> "cursor from pixbuf" stuff should be able to go in anyways.

Yes, I think it's far beyond what can be managed in the next couple of 
weeks.  I mostly wanted to make sure the general direction for cursor 
support would not take an ill-advised detour in this release...

> It strikes me as a bit of a problem if in some cursor themes all your
> resize handles for a window show the same cursor... especially with 
> some old window managers where the resize cursor provided essential
> information as to what was going to happen.

Perhaps true; I don't have any objective measurements on how useful that 
particular feedback is to "ordinary" users.  Perhaps all that is really 
needed is a 'fallback' cursor used for standard cursors which aren't 
implemented in a particular theme.

> The conclusion I'd draw from that is that we should pick a reasonable
> sized set of standard cursors, say that icon themes should support
> all of them. Too much flexibility will reduce consistency.

I guess I'm somewhat interested in permitting translation of existing 
cursor themes from other window systems to be used without extension, that 
would of necessity require substitution.

-keith