Re: Still need a hint for undecorated windows



On Monday 20 June 2005 19:30, Owen Taylor wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-06-20 at 18:32 -0400, Adam Jackson wrote:
> > I've seen a few comments about this in the archives, but no motion on it.
> > Apps still need a way to draw themselves undecorated, and right now there
> > are two ways to do it while still being managed.  The first is mwm hints,
> > which have no formal blessing by netwm; and the other is setting yourself
> > to TYPE_DOCK, which works on every wm I've tested but is semantically
> > bogus.
> >
> > So I guess the question is whether to make this its own atom, or a new
> > value for _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE.
>
> What's the *semantic* reason? (If "dock" is wrong, then you must
> have an idea :-)

Well _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_DOCK is wrong because xmms is not a dock, and because 
in most wms it has a side effect on stacking order.  Likewise floating pagers 
or Dashboard-style applets are not docks.  Docks are the things that stick to 
the edge of your screen undecorated, motionless, and usually in a higher 
layer.  The way the spec is written now, the TYPE is a description of the 
function of the window.  So I don't think it's valid to add TYPE_FRAMELESS, 
because that's not a class of functionality, that's a decoration style.

The spec does mention the mwm hints, but does not say the wm should honor 
them, and in fact makes the claim that WINDOW_TYPE is the intended 
replacement for the motif hints.  So a client that strictly conforms to netwm 
cannot be drawn undecorated without side effects, and a wm that strictly 
conforms has no standard way of providing undecorated windows.

The alternative, of course, is just documenting that conforming wms must honor 
at least some subset of the motif decoration hints.

- ajax

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