Re: _NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW, revisited

[Elijah Newren <newren gmail com>]

On 7/22/05, Lubos Lunak <l lunak suse cz> wrote:

>  How about we move from bad analogies and theories to practice? Can you post
> proposed changes to the spec for what you want?

I don't believe any changes the to spec are needed; it already
explicitly allows what we want to do.  I was emailing because no one
responded to your original email[1] where you requested that we change
_NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW to not allow switching the workspace of a window
and further that we, at least temporarily, agreed to make the change
you requested in Metacity[2].  I feel that such a change, if adopted
into the spec (it never was), would introduce policy to the hint and
lead to inconsistent behavior among apps as they tried to work around
it.  I just wanted to avoid having the proposed _NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW
changes be adopted as official and/or be included into the spec. 
Maybe I didn't need to send an email about this, I don't know.  But I
figured it couldn't hurt to bring up, just in case.  I'm sorry if I've
wasted anyone's time with this.

However, I felt that it might also be useful to add some kind of hint
for a different kind of activation (though my original intent was just
to see if others wanted it and to assist if so, otherwise to not
bother).  At first, the only hint that I had thought of was for the
window selector (e.g. "I'm a pager that has workspace-aware UI in my
presententation of windows to the user, please act accordingly"), but
you also suggested that it may be useful to distinguish between
activating a window in a way that acts like a launch and activating an
existing window.  Is this something others are interested in at this
time?

Elijah