Re: Motif Hints [was: Re: Fwd: Draft 1]

[Matthias Clasen <clasen pong mathematik uni-freiburg de>]

> 
> Well, put it this way: It's pretty common on MS-Windows. The tool windows are

Not a very strong argument. I don't think that having loads of toplevel
windows and expect the wm to decorate them all differently is a good 
UI design strategy.  

> still reasonable usable with the mouse _and_ look clearly distinct from fully
> decorated windows. Since they are usually used over the main window (they stay
> on top, of course), the reduced titlebar saves spaces.

Not making them separate toplevels to begin with might save even more space.

[...]

> 
> You are right, we can achieve quite some things with the MWM hints. But I
> somehow don't like them, they don't feel right and I think that they don't fit
> into X.  The main problem is, that they are not logical hints, but purely
> visual ones. They define for example, whether or not a window should have a
> minimize button. Now, a dialog should IMO never have a minimum button. So I
> would program my toolkit in a way that dialogs don't set this hint. Isn't that
> slightly weird? Shouldn't we rather define classes of windows and let the
> window manager decide how to decorate them and how to present the window to the
> user? 
> 

You have a point here. But if we decide to invent some kind of "window class"
hint, we should try to find a meaningful classification of windows first,
not just select some classes because "win/mac has that". And we should
put some hints on how these classes would normally be decorated into the 
spec.


-- 
Matthias Clasen, 
Tel. 0761/203-5606
Email: clasen@mathematik.uni-freiburg.de
Mathematisches Institut, Albert-Ludwigs-Universitaet Freiburg