Re: Applications and layers

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Mon, Jun 09, 2003 at 07:46:56AM -0500, Billy Biggs wrote:
>   Since my first post I've educated myself on the two specs.  So
> let me ask specifically about _NET_WM_STATE_ABOVE and BELOW, is
> this something my application should support on startup or as a
> specific 'mode', or is it something that a window manager should
> be setting?

The _WIN spec is dead dead dead, ignore it. Only use the _NET hints.

ABOVE and BELOW are generally user-manipulable states, in contrast to
the semantic type (DESKTOP, DOCK, etc.). Normally you would set a
semantic type and not set ABOVE or BELOW; the WM will then put the
window in the normal layer for its type.

However if for some reason defaulting your app to ABOVE or BELOW 
makes sense (perhaps a "sticky notes" app should default to BELOW 
for example), then it seems OK to set them on startup.

Providing a --on-top/--on-bottom command line option or something
has nothing wrong with it in principle, though personally I wouldn't
add it to my apps on the grounds that it's bloat. ;-)

>   How should I describe these modes to the user?  "above" and
> "below" don't make intuitive sense to me.

This is not something that's specified/standardized.
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=98387 has some discussion if
you are interested. Looks like "always on top" is a popular choice.

Havoc