Re: "What's this"

[Sasha_Vasko osca state mo us]

> 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

You cannot install new cursor since help client has an active grab on the
pointer at the moment

> 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.)

You cannot query what was the old cursor

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

Actuall protocol used by XDND is much more complicated and includes
complicated
2-way message exchange, and it does takes ownership of selection, but
mostly
for the purpose of avoiding possible situation where 2 DND operations will
be
attempted at the same time. Like I said before - "what's this" stuff could
be
done by simply utilizing XDND protocol with custom action,
like _NET_XdndActionWhatsThis for example.

> 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).

yes it is outside of the scope of this specs. Still, just as a general
idea,
think about it: wouldnot that be nice if there was a single app that could
have given you a help on each and every client/widget on the desktop in
some
standard view, no matter if the widget is from GTK or from KDE or other
place ?
Maybe not exactly a "Whats this" feature - sort of like man page browser
only
smart enough to query what text should be displayed from the client window
by
itself - with no user typing in a name to look up.

> Michael

Cheers
Sasha Vasko