Re: Which definition of "dialog"?

[Lubos Lunak <l lunak suse cz>]

On Thursday 04 of September 2003 19:40, Gregory Merchan wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 04, 2003 at 02:14:28PM +0200, Lubos Lunak wrote:
[snip]
> > > What is intended in the EWMH spec?
> >
> >  Why should that matter? Do you have any specific reason to differentiate
> > between those two kinds? KDE sets TYPE_DIALOG on all windows that are
> > dialogs, even for KControl modules, and I don't see any problem with
> > that.
>
> It matters because one class of window (modeless) should have a close
> button in the window frame and the other (modal) shouldn't. If not for
> having seen some modeless dialogs with OK and Cancel, I think the
> _NET_WM_STATE_MODAL hint would suffice for distinguishing them.

 Hmm. I don't make any such difference between dialog windows in KWin. All 
dialogs have close button in the decoration, and the toolkit translates it to 
pressing the cancel button (which is not necessarily always the "Cancel" 
button, simply the one that closes the dialog without doing anything). At 
least Qt does so, and I think Gtk does it as well. In fact, I learnt to use 
Alt+F4 for closing Gtk1 dialogs, because awfully high number of them happily 
ignore Esc.
 If you really want to have this feature, I think you could simply use the 
STATE_MODAL flag. The worst thing that will happen is that some dialogs will 
have the close button even in cases you didn't intent to.

>
> Your response seems to indicate that your definition of dialog includes
> modeless dialogs; the first definition I gave. Am I correct? Is that the
> definition everyone is using? In other words, is the spec using the same
> definition of dialog that the MacOS HIG uses?
>
> I'll not nitpick for a particular nomenclature here. I just need to know
> how the spec is to be interpreted.

 My personal opinion on this is that this is not exactly specified. The spec 
simply says "dialog". But it looks like it's usually interpreted the first 
way. You can also see 
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/wm-spec-list/2002-October/msg00007.html .

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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