Re: issues for future version

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

jg pa dec com (Jim Gettys) writes:
> Not all that weird.  

OK, I've never used a PDA... so "weird to me" - I assume the idea is
to save space.

> You just use the docking mechanisms for panels for this...

Right now they are not the kind of thing you'd want in a spec; too
embarassing. ;-)

Owen and Matthias developed an XEmbed spec for this that AFAIK hasn't
yet been posted, but GTK 2 and Qt 3 support it I think. Owen wanted an
X extension to get it 100% reliable though.

Still, docking arbitrary stuff in the titlebar sounds like a lot of
crackrock to me. ;-) Maybe a list of strings to be displayed inside
buttons, with the WM rendering the actual buttons (app just provides
the text) - that's relatively simple/cheap to implement, and doesn't
break themes (as much).

But I know for a WM supporting these hints I'd want to see a separate
"PDA mode" and ignore such hints unless I was in PDA mode. These
titlebar buttons are definitely out of line for desktop
machines. There's too much usability value in consistent window
borders.

Maybe we could have a separate section in the spec for "PDA hints" -
I'd want to see a few people who actively hack on PDAs working on that
section, rather than the usual crowd here.

Havoc