Re: Still need a hint for undecorated windows

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

Lubos Lunak wrote:

> On Tuesday 28 of June 2005 14:05, Bill Haneman wrote:
>  
>
> > Lubos Lunak wrote:
> >    
> >
> > > On Monday 27 of June 2005 11:31, Bradley T Hughes wrote:
> > >      
> > >
> > > > Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > > >        
> > > Nobody has still said any good reason why we'd need a noborder hint. WINE
> > > - ok, that's legacy. XMMS - that's legacy. Using the MWM legacy for this
> > > legacy is fine.
> > >      
> > I think my reasons were quite sound; applications can and will (despite
> > what you may think they should do) pop up windows that they don't want
> > decorated.  For accessibility reasons it is vital that such windows not
> > be override-redirect.
> >    
>
> Are you talking about things such as popup menus? If yes, I'm not sure it 
> would be a good idea to involve the WM in it. These windows are fully under 
> the control of the app, including grabbing the input, and the WM could 
> interfere in nasty ways. IMHO it'd be probably simpler to find a way that 
> doesn't involve the WM, or you should first try a proof of concept 
> implementation.
>  
Hi Lubos:

For 'normal' popups like menus, I agree with you that the toolkit 
probably should be using _NET_WORKAREA intelligently.   But I really 
don't know that this is 'simpler' because you have to fix every toolkit, 
and every app that works-around the toolkit or does this in a 
non-standard way, and you have to get every toolkit maintainer to accept 
your patches, etc.  Given that the WM is being invoked as a sort of 
standard bearer for 'good behavior', why not fix it there?  Besides, 
even for menus, I don't think the toolkit can get it right for 
accessibility using override-redirect because, for instance...

...even if all popups use _NET_WORKAREA correctly, what about assistive 
technology windows that use transparent visuals, or which are 
COMPOSITE-based magnification areas, and which therefore need to be on 
top even of popups?  On this list it's often said that lots of 
window-related behavior should _not_ be up to the apps, but up to the 
WM, and that apps should be responsible for the window contents but not 
the 'meta behaviors'.  Why should the raising of popups be different?  
(The business of override-redirect stacking actually gets more complex 
IMO with the advent of alpha visuals in X)

At the end of the day, giving this important task to the WM still seems 
simpler (and better) to me; the WM is already responsible for most 
window-stacking and window-placement policy, and as such I think it is 
in a better position to mediate with respect to accessibility, 
_NET_WORKAREA, and the expected future TYPE for 
'I-am-an-assistive-technology-and-I-need-to-be-on-top' (no matter what 
we call it).

And I still have the strong suspicion that there are other kinds of 
popups and 'intentionally un-bordered' windows out there that don't have 
TRANSIENT or a similar hint set...

Bill