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

[Matthias Ettrich <ettrich troll no>]

On Mon, 21 Jun 1999, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> > 
> > 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.  

Have a tool or a dialog look like an independent appliation isn't either.

> 
> > 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.

Sure, if you want to piss people off who have large workstation-like screens and
prefer dragging the tools outside the main window.

[snip]

> 
> 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.

Here a agree. Though I consider "win/mac has it" a strong argument. We (at
least I) want to prepare X11 to be powerful enough so that commercial
applications can be ported from the Mac or Windows world. Right now, it isn't
(again: see Stardivion), unless they vendors implement their own window
decorations. This is something I want to avoid since decorations are a) the
task of the WM and b) should be consistent throughout all applications.

Matthias