Re: Still need a hint for undecorated windows

[Elijah Newren <newren gmail com>]

On 7/25/05, Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman sun com> wrote:

> >Well, this probably isn't the answer you were looking for, but no, the
> >only language in the spec is that the MWM hints are deprecated.
> >
> This is, as you suggest, totally unhelpful.

At least it doesn't cause damage, though, which would be the result of
official support of allowing apps-may-dictate-policy in the spec.

> If WMs don't support what apps want, apps will hack around this or vote
> with their feet, finding WMs that allow them to do what they want
> (however crazy we think that may be). This undermines the whole value of
> having a spec.  If a spec is too rigid or limited, then it's almost
> like having no spec at all - the whole point of a spec is having a
> STANDARD, supported way of doing things.  The point of a wm spec is NOT,
> IMHO, to tell application writers what kind of interfaces they
> should/shouldn't be creating.

Putting policy into the spec such as the MWM hints results in totally
inconsistent behavior among apps.  It results in situations like the
following:

  app A says "Well I'm a dialog, so I'll place my window here, not decorate the
  window, manually raise my parent whenever I'm raised, have my parent raise me
  whenever it is raised, make sure that any move of me or my parent is
  accompanied by a move in the other window so I'm always at the same location
  relative to my parent, I'll cue the WM to include me in the alt-tab
list, but I don't
  want to appear in the taskbar"

  app B says "Well, I'm a dialog, so I'll make sure my parent window raises me
  whenever it gets raised, and I'll have the taskbar stick me in the
list of windows"

Apps shouldn't be specifying policy--WMs should be.

That said, I agree we have a problem that not enough semantic types
are covered in the spec.  But the right way to converge to a
consistent solution is to add more semantic hints (and I think you had
some good cases for adding more), not to adopt a short term "fix" that
sends us down the wrong path (besides, I'll note that we already have
a short term fix--most WMs support these deprecated hints for now
anyway and will probably continue to do so for the forseeable future)


Hope that helps,
Elijah