Re: "What's this"

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Sasha_Vasko osca state mo us writes: 
> 
> So what is this exactly we are arguing about ? What is your alternative?
> 

My original thought on this was just a spec for putting the ? button
in the WM decoration. That is, the client would set a hint "I support
what's this" and the WM would send a message if the user clicked the
what's this button. But the actual help is just within the app.

The more ambitious idea is that clicking what's this works for the
entire desktop. This would require a protocol similar to
drag-and-drop, which would normally be implemented in toolkits (since
the only people who no longer use toolkits are people writing window
managers, pretty much, and even the newer WMs use a toolkit whenever
they want to display dialogs and such).

This would work similar to drag-and-drop; a client would enter what's
this mode (grab pointer, change cursor); somehow notify other clients
that the mode was entered so they could highlight targets; as you
moved the pointer around, it would change to indicate whether you were
on a target; when you then clicked on a target, the target would
receive some sort of message and reply back to the whatsthis-mode
owner app that it should release the grab and leave the mode.

There is a problem with inconsistency between toolkits, but this same
problem exists for all aspects of toolkit look-and-feel, and it can be
solved via theme coordination in the same way we'll solve e.g. button
appearance.

Havoc