Re: Quick question about spec

[Paul Warren <pdw ferret lmh ox ac uk>]

On Tue, 15 Feb 2000, Tim Janik wrote:
> On Sat, 12 Feb 2000, Paul Warren wrote:

> > I should have some time after Tuesday.  I will take a stab at doing the
> > first bit - fixing the final details, but I really don't have the time or
> > motivation to rewrite entirely as I think the intended audience is
> > sufficiently specialised and technical to understand it in its current
> > form.
> 
> ok paul.
> 
> first, if you need help on specific sections, tell me, i'll give you
> a hand where possible. then i've just skimmed over the last mails
> again, and there were quite a bunch of wording corrections suggested
> for the latest revision. do you need help in recollecting those items
> and integrating them?

I've got an archive of everything on the list, but some suggestions on how
to implement them would be great.

> > I have a todo list of things that I intended to put in, but have not had
> > time to write up.  Mostly these are suggestions/reminders from Tim Janik:
> > 
> > o _NET_VIRTUAL_ROOT
> 
> i think that one is still outstanding, what about:
> 
> _NET_VIRTUAL_ROOT
> 
> A property to be set on window manager windows that serve as a new root window,
> by covering the real root window entirely entirely for a specific viewport or
> desktop, and by having application windows reparented to them. (This is often
> used for virtual desktop implementations by window managers.)

This sounds good, although a brief explanation of the purpose of the
property would be useful - it is for pager apps to know which windows to
watch, right?

> _NET_WM_HANDLED_ICONS
> 
> A property to be set by clients such as taskbars or pagers on their window, to
> indicate that the window manager should not provide icons for minimised windows.
> 
> s/minimised/iconified/ here?

Yes. Sounds fine.

> > o Mandate ICCCM compliant window moves.
> 
> ok, i do not know where you want to put this, but to try to come up with
> a good recomendatoin (basically reworded from the relevant mails on that topic):
> 
> Window Movement
> 
> According to the ICCCM, applications should not see unnecessary differences
> between running with or without a window manager. Therefore window movements
> for already mapped windows, such as ones requested by
> XMoveWindow(Display, Window, X, Y) have to move the window Window to the
> coordinates (X, Y) and not cause the window's window manager frame window
> to end up at (X, Y).

Yep - sounds reasonable.  There is clearly confusion over which of the two
alternatives is "correct", hence different WMs implement it differently.
Far more important than getting it right is making it consistent.

> > o Detection of compliant Window Managers - should set a property on WM
> > owned window, to avoid stale root window property if the WM dies
> > unexpectedly.
> 
> yes, that requires only slight changes to the wm identification property.

So, is there any problem with reusing the existing method described in
the old Gnome spec at:

http://developer.gnome.org/doc/standards/wm/c4.html#AEN6

(apart from changing the property names...)

> > o Expand on write up of _NET_ACTIVATE.
> 
> what was that for?

Sorry, that should be _NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW, and more specifically the
degrees of activation, as described on:

http://www-jcr.lmh.ox.ac.uk/~pdw/wm-spec/wm-spec-1.9d/x55.html

What is the purpose of the degrees of activation?

> > o Context help - implement basic protocol for WM to invoke context help on
> > client window.
> 
> has anyone suggested an implementation for that at all?

Yep, Matthias suggested a wm protocol.  See:

http://www.gnome.org/mailing-lists/archives/wm-spec-list/1999-December/0006.shtml

and Owen Taylor then suggested adapting the xdnd protocol to this
purpose:

http://www.gnome.org/mailing-lists/archives/wm-spec-list/1999-December/0008.shtml

I'm not familiar with the xdnd protocol, but what he suggests sounds
good - allowing the application to give some feedback as to whether the
user is going to get any help when they click.  

We never got any feedback on this idea.  I would like to include both
possibilities - the Matthias' suggestion is pretty simple to implement
on the WM.  The best way to do Owen's suggestion involves the WM
implementing some of the Xdnd protocol, which I suspect some WM authors
would be reluctant to implement.  It would be nice to have the first
protocol as a fall back for the second.

It would be good to hear some feedback on this item.  I'll get on with
writing up some of the other items.

yours,

Paul