Re: _NEW_WM_CURRENT_URI

[Lubos Lunak <l lunak suse cz>]

On Tuesday 01 of June 2010, Michal Hruby wrote:
> Hi,
>
> lately we've seen more interest in semantic desktop, and one thing we're
> missing is a standardized way to determine what document(-s) is an
> application working with (see [1] for more background info).
>
> Nepomuk guys are already starting to use special DBus service to which
> supported apps talk, and we in Zeitgeist are also using plugins for
> various apps to tell us which resource they use.
> Therefore I suggest adding new X property where windows would indicate
> which resource is currently opened inside them and update this property
> when another document is opened or tab with different document is
> activated.

 Makes sense. We've already talked about this too in KDE.

> There were also suggestions to make this property a list of uris, but
> I'm still not convinced this is a good idea - we shouldn't automatically
> assume that all uris opened in an app are related to each other (see
> people using lots of tabs in browsers, never-ending list of uris for
> media-players, ...).
>
> This will also allow implementing document-based pagers to push the
> limits of current application-based ones.

 This last paragraph should be a good reason for having a list of URIs instead 
of just one URI - if you really want to be document-based, then you need to 
know all documents. If you know only the URI open in app's active tab, then 
you care more about the application than the documents. If the pager is to be 
document-based, then it needs to know the documents.

 That make cause some problems you mention, but I don't know enough about the 
semantic stuff to judge. But since per-document seems logical, I think 
solution to those problems should be built on top of this. For example, 
several unrelated tabs in one browser window is a reality, you can't just 
ignore it, and if it's a problem, I'd expect it to be a problem also 
elsewhere than just usage of this property.

 Having this per-document also brings some technical problems. It'd be useful 
to also know window title and icon for each tab, and when we talked about 
this for KDE, we found it useful if there was also 'application type' 
information (category from .desktop file spec). Encoding that in one or more 
properties in some sane way will be interesting.

-- 
 Lubos Lunak
 openSUSE Boosters team, KDE developer
 l lunak suse cz , l lunak kde org