Re: Application modal transients windows

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico redhat com>]

>  "Before anyone suggests passing raw image data to the WM, I will say that
>  is IMO a really bad idea."
>  
>  Is it just the burden that it will place on the WM for rendering these
>  icons?

The problem with passing 1-bit pixmaps is that they are ugly.

If you pass an arbitrary pixmap, the window manager has no way to know
about which colormap your application had in mind when it generated
it.  It also presents an inconvenience since the application may have
used a different visual than the WM expects.

RGBA data can be easily reduced and dithered to whatever
visual/colormap the window manager happens to be using.  And any
self-respecting WM already has the code to do it, anyways; otherwise
it would not be able to load user-specified icons from files.

[Performance-wise it is not an issue, either; you can stick a hunk of
RGBA data on a property and forget about it, and the data will be
small, while for posting a pixmap ID you have to XSync() first to
ensure the server already has the pixmap ready.]

  Federico