Re: Application modal transients windows

[raster rasterman com]

On  5 Nov, Federico Mena Quintero scribbled:
->  >  "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.]

and the RA data is equivalent in memeoyr usage to a 32bit pixmap - so
for peopel who run 32bpp its the exact same memory usage - for those in
16bpp its only double the memeory the same sized pixmap uses - ut you
dont need to keep a mask aswell and get full alpha channelling and the
WM can handle losy renderign if the display is not capable of
displaying 24/32bpp :)

the only thing i think we need to agree on is the wormat.. DWORD ARGB
or DWROD RGBA or byt packed ARGB or RGBa or what.. we just need to
agree on a format - perosonally i advocate DWORD ARGB packed data
(32bit ARGB with alpha in the high byte - why - because x86 and alpha
both use this endianess and for pixmaps.ximiages in 32bpp the high
bytse is unused so onverting to a pixmap is a memcpy to an Ximage...
then a PutImage - and x86/alpha endinaess is the most common one we see
so i'd vote for using the most commonly used format/byte ordering as
the default)

-- 
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The Rasterman (Carsten Haitzler)    raster@rasterman.com     raster@valinux.com
                                    raster@enlightenment.org raster@linux.com
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