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[maltee at lavabit.com]

First of all, especially after reading through the mailing list for a bit,
I think Wayland is an amazing project and I want to thank everyone
contributing to it! Keep up the great work!

I used to be against Client Side Decorations, but after reading through
the mailing list, I'm starting to think this might actually be the way to
go. But one (imho important) question remains unanswered: How are we going
to maintain uniformity amongst decorations? My concern is rather the feel,
than the look. Application windows look different anyway, but with X, all
titlebars (with very few exceptions, such as chromium) look and behave
roughly the same. Button orders of applications being different would have
a huge impact on usability, even button sizes and exact positions is
something to worry about. On a GTK+ based Desktop you probably want GTK+
based window decorations. Qt applications will probably integrate the look
and feel, so this won't be a problem. But what about applications that
don't use a specific toolkit, such as games or X for wayland? I see no
way, those would actually start using one of the major toolkits instead
(which would be a very bad idea). Should everyone start implementing their
own decorations, resulting in a decoration chaos? We definitely need some
standard.
Mac OS X and Windows don't have this problem because they each have a
default toolkit most of the other available toolkits try to wrap/emulate.
On Linux we have to deal with the advantages and disadvantages of variety
with no standard. Inconsistency of decorations is nothing we should take
for inevitable.

Unfortunatly, I don't understand much of the subject, I might be talking
rubbish, so please bear with me: My general idea is to define some sort of
plugin API for decorations. Toolkits/Applications can provide their own
decoration plugin which is used unless overridden and would integrate well
with the application window. There might be a very simple default
decoration provided by wayland. Applications can allow to replace their
own decoration with something else (or test the desktops default for
functionality and decide whether they want to use their own or not).
Decorations can interact with Applications on ABI basis rather than
protocol basis.
+ Decorations would integrate well with application windows for the
majority of applications on the desktop
+ All decorations will have the same look&feel (with few exceptions)
+ Applications that do not use a specific toolkit would not have to
implement their own decorations
+ Applications that want to do something fancy, like tabs (chromium) in
the decoration can do so by extending the toolkit's decoration plugin so
they will have something that looks similar to many other applications and
they don't need to reinvent the wheel.
+ People who want something special can write their own decorations, just
like people write their own window managers now.

Maybe Client Side Decorations are the way to go, but not before the
consistency issue is solved!

Regards,
Malte E.