Please Don't Use Cleint Side Window Decorations

[Fabian Henze]

Hi all,
I am rather new to all this and I don't know all the facts, so please forgive 
me, if my concerns are stupid or not valid at all.

On Thu 04 Nov 2010 04:22:37-PDT, Justin Lee wrote:
> In considering consistent look and feel issue of window decorations
> due to client-side window decoration, maybe we shouldn't let the
> toolkit (Qt/GTK) render decorations nor let the app render its
> decoration directly. Rather, there should be a separate, independent
> library (may be called libWinDeco) dedicated to render window
> decorations. Whenever an app needs to render its decoration, it calls
> libWinDeco to help the job. Then this becomes a programming
> convention/protocol to each Wayland app that Wayland app should use
> libWinDeco to render decoration by default (unless the app want to be
> maverick, it can disregard the convention and render its decoration by
> itself directly). If all Wayland apps follow the convention, they will
> have consistent look and feel of window decorations as all the
> decorations are rendered by the same code, i.e. libWinDeco.
>
> By this way, highly customizable window appearances are still possible
> if libWinDeco is designed to be configurable. Where 'configurable'
> means behaviors of libWinDeco are controlled by a single, universal,
> system-wide config file (which specifies button attributes, title bar
> appearances etc.).
[..]
> libWinDeco should be designed to be easy to use in order to make
> programmers willing to follow the convention therefore glitchy apps
> become rare.

This seems like a much more complicated and error-prone solution compared to 
server-side window decorations (sswd ;)). I am wondering what you gain 
compared to sswd? In other words: How is this an improvement over the current 
design of X.org?
Todays X applications can already hide their window decorations and do their 
own stuff, but this technique is not used very often (at least for full-blown 
application windows) at the moment, so why make it the default?

--
regards,
Fabian Henze
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