Re: _NET: Disabling shading

["Denis O. Mikhalkin" <dom sparc spb su>]

On Wed, 2003-10-01 at 01:29, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > On Tue, 2003-09-30 at 10:22, Denis O. Mikhalkin wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > > 
> > > we want to open the discussion regarding support for shading in
> > > different WMs, in particular those implementing _NET protocol.
> > > 
> > > Right now there is no means in _NET protocol to disable shading for
> > > a window. There is no state of the window in which the WM would
> > > consider shading for this window disabled. We propose to add a special
> > > state to support disabled shading.
> > > 
> 
> My view is that this needs to fit in to a larger replacement plan for
> the MWM hints. The MWM hints currently cover disabling minimization,
> etc.
> 
> My view on that replacement plan is that we should stick to the semantic
> window types, and deprecate all hints that explicitly control the window
> controls and other features. 
Well, this might cause problems to general toolkits. Some developers
like to have the control over the kind of the window and you might not
predict what is the combination of features developer might like. If you
restrict developer in features he will certainly find workarounds, but
they most likely will be hacks. I think WM shouldn't restrict without
good reasons the set of features and their availability. It MUST though
control the correctness of their usage. Anyway, in WM internally, you
keep a set of flags describing the features every kind of window
represents, not just the kind of window.

> Modal dialogs should be implemented in
> toolkits by setting the MODAL hint and hints such as TRANSIENT_FOR
> indicating which windows are modal-shadowed, and that's it. The WM has
> to do the rest such as changing available controls and preventing focus
> of shadowed windows.
I agree with that. However again need to mention that focusability of
modally-shadowed windows can be different depending on situation - some
programs might like to give the user the ability to copy/paste from
modally-shadowed window, some might decide to block all input on them.

> 
> We may well need to have a richer language for expressing which windows
> are modal shadowed though; at the very least, the spec needs to be more
> clear about how to determine which windows are unresponsive while a
> window of type MODAL is active.
Agree. I don't think that the explicit list is required, but the exact
definition of what modal window of some modal types blocks is necessary.

Denis