Decorations (again)

[Matthias Ettrich <ettrich troll no>]

Hi,

the first time we discussed decorations, it looked like there was a small
majority to keep and to support exclusively the MOTIF hints.

Later I had the feeling the most people are open to replace them with something
better, integrated in the NET specification. This will also cause a little
speedup (one roundtrip less), remember, all client window information of the
net protocol can be read in one stream (even the icons ).

One of the problems I see with the MOTIF hints is there visual nature. They
give applications control to decide what kind of buttons or functions shall be
visible on the window decoration. This is a concept directly taken from
Windows-2.0, I assume, and doesn't fit well into the X world where window
managers are the ones responsible for window decoration and window management.

So the basic idea is to introduce a *logical* decoration hint. Last time we
discussed that I wasn't very creative finding logical window groups. We
basically had the three visual groups:

       - normal windows ( the WM already knows if something is a dialog with
                                     the transient_for hint)

      - toolwindows (usually smaller decorations )

       - windows that do not want to be decorated (but managed to gain focus
                handling. Panels and such are in this cathegory).

       - windows that do not want any decoration but want to be resizeable by
             the wm with a tiny frame (floating toolbars, etc.).


Not very logical, I admit, but practical. Will cover a lot of cases, but
there's more to it:

What about the additional groups:

      - message box
      - critical message box
      - error message box 
        ( these hints may also influence the WMs activation behaviour)
        

Raster, last time we talked about that you mentioned you have other window
groups in mind. Any suggestions?


Another topic are modal dialogs. Can't remember whether we discussed that. I
was wondering whether a hint MODAL_FOR (similar to transient_for) may be useful.
It would give the WM a hint which window to activate (there's no point in
activating a window that has a modal_for window open).


Matthias