Focus stealing

[Michael T <raselmsh hotmail com>]

Dear List,

I wanted to post about a subject that annoys many people, but has somehow
apparently never been adequately solved.  More specifically, I have a simple
suggestion as to how this problem could be solved once and for all, and I would
like feedback on it (read I am ready to be flamed for my ignorance in thinking
it will do any good :) ).

Basically, my idea is that focus stealing is almost never the right thing to do,
but that in the few situations where it is, the window having its focus stolen
*will know that that this should be happening*.  So, that window could create a
property advertising the fact that it is ready to have its focus stolen,
optionally including information about the window that will steal the focus to
prevent the wrong one from doing it.  This property could even be set and
deleted automatically by new application start-up APIs in Gnome and KDE.

That was it.  Comments?  Flames? :)

Regards,

Michael