Pagers and stay-on-top

[textshell t-online de]

Hi,


the first thing i would like to say is that i'm new to this group and
haven't read all the discussed specs.

But i think that, it sould be possible for applications and/or desktops
to provide an own interface to the user to let him change the state of
the window state. This is important for many different things from
letting the user automate some thing in an application provided
script-language to such screwed up but always implemented programs (mp3
players) that insist on their own user interface(won't hurt in that sort
of programs).

So I think that there should be an way for programs to manipulate the
state of windows, but it's use should be restricted to only the cases
where the **user** overrides the defaults.

I think the way to support pagers/tasklists isn't far from that. These
standalone pagers/tasklists don't have to support every feature of the
WM, but just be an option for the users.



On staying on top the same as above holds true. The user might wish to
have an an toolbar icon to just make a window stay on top without going
to the wm provided menus. (I'm  using sawmill 0.23 and this is quite a
long way to get there.)


I know that providing programs with the possibility may make the desktop
more sensitve for DoS-attacks but i think it is not really an big theat,
because the WM can block such request if fired in rapid succession.

The window manager totaly controls the policy is great, but i think this
is convention and can not be enforced with an window manager
specification, because if one likes to break it he just needs to
override the WM.


I hope this sounded not too odd, and this helped a bit seeing the view
point of someone who learned about GUI using and programming mostly in
the windows world.


   Martin