MacOS-style menus

[Michael ROGERS <M Rogers cs ucl ac uk>]

Well debate seems to have stagnated a bit again (unless everyone is over on
the website?), so I thought I'd throw some more petrol on the fire. As you
will have gathered I'm pretty ignorant about Xlib and the ICCCM, so I may be
asking for something impossible, but I think the following would be a useful 
feature if it's possible:

An application sets a property on one of its menu bars to identify it as the
main menu bar. The window manager, seeing this property, may reparent the menu
bar into a frame at the top of the screen, MacOS-style, making the menus
easier to "hit" with the mouse. When a new window gets focus, the old menu bar
window is hidden and the new one is reparented into the frame.

Problems: 

All main menu bars must be snatched by the window manager as soon as they 
request to be mapped, otherwise they will appear until the user tries to focus 
the window, then jump away to the top of the screen, which will drive people 
mad.

Some applications will not set this property, so an inconsistent interface
will be presented. This could be avoided by having the toolkit set the
property automatically, but what about apps with more than one menu bar? Maybe 
the app author should have to specifically *remove* the property from 
additional menu bars? Are there any apps with more than one menu bar (as
opposed to a menu bar and a button bar?)

(The reason I brought this up on wm-spec-list rather than gnome-devel-list was
because any new hints to allow MacOS-style menus would have to go into the
spec. Sorry if this is too tangential or irrelevant to this list.)

Michael Rogers