Re: "What's this"

[Michael Rogers <mrogers cs ucl ac uk>]

On Mon, May 07, 2001 at 02:30:19PM -0500, Sasha_Vasko osca state mo us wrote:
> What cursor feedback exactly are you talking about. Care to provide some
> definition ? Or did I miss something ? Besides any cursor manipulations
> by client apps are highly discouraged in X.

I think the idea is this:

When the user clicks on the "What's this?" button, the owner of the button 
(let's call it the help client) grabs the pointer. Whenever the pointer 
enters a new window, the help client sends a message to that window. The 
owner of the window can install a new cursor to indicate that help is 
available for that widget (similar to the way DnD targets can identify 
themselves). Old toolkits will not understand the message, so the cursor 
will not change, so the user will know that no help is available. When 
the pointer leaves the window, the help client sends another message so 
the old cursor can be reinstalled. (The client should reinstall the old 
cursor after a few seconds if no messages are received from the help 
client, in case the help client has crashed.)

When the user clicks on a widget, the help client sends a message to the 
clicked window and releases the pointer.

The clicked widget can show simple tooltip-style help, or launch a 
standalone help browser if necessary. Neither method involves much 
bloat. The client doesn't need its own help browser. It could check the 
value of some environment variable / X resource / GConf resource to find 
out which app to launch, but that's really outside the scope of the WM 
spec (although it should probably be standardised in another freedesktop 
document).

Michael