Re: "What's this"

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

jg pa dec com (Jim Gettys) writes:
> All that is really needed is to decorate the widget windows with
> the class and instance data from the toolkit, and then one can
> have an external process do the display.

One problem with that is that we already have a bunch of widgets (or
useful-to-communicate-with widget subportions such as sheet cells)
that don't have an X window.

> We need that data for things like "Hands off X" to work,
> and doing it externally means that it can be done to almost any
> application, independent of the author, in a uniform fashion
> across toolkits.

If "Hands off X" is speech recognition stuff, the general GTK plan
here (for in-process) is the accessibility API Sun is contributing.

Then there is some out-of-process protocol yet to be defined, and a
GTK module would be loaded into apps which exported the data obtained
from the accessibility API to an alternative/supplemental input/output
mechanism living in another process.

I think "what's this" is very simple; you just have some way of
signaling that you're in "what's this" mode, toolkits highlight
widgets with available help; and you send some sort of message to
whatever window gets clicked on, and the toolkit pops up the help.

App authors just call widget_set_whats_this() and the toolkit
magically makes it work.

Havoc