protocol questions

[Daniel Stone]

Hi Yichao,

On 3 April 2013 17:50, Yichao Yu <yyc1992 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 3, 2013 at 12:43 PM, Kristian Høgsberg <hoegsberg at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> I can't think of anything that does this in any desktop environment
>> I've ever seen.  If as usecase for this comes up we can certainly add
>> it, or any desktop environment can define its own extension to allow
>> this kind of behavior.  But think about it - spontaneously popping up
>> a window that grabs pointer and keyboard input is not a nice thing to
>> do.  Typically a system-tray would pop up a tooltip or a notification
>> bubble, and then maybe you can go click on it to popup a menu.
>
> I am talking about real use case, which is the statusnotification protocol.
> Why is having a focus not enough for this??

I think the point Kristian's trying to make is that the user
interaction is different.  When you launch a popup menu, it grabs all
input, and the user cannot interact with any other application unless
it's dismissed.  Notification windows usually appear and slide away
after a small time, but never exclusively grab input and prevent the
user from interacting with other applications until they're explicitly
dismissed.  If that happened every time I received an email, I
would've smashed my laptop to bits by now.

Pop-up has a very specific meaning here: it's a menu launched by the
active application in response to user input, which can be dismissed
without penalty either when the user interacts with an element outside
the menu, or, e.g., when the screensaver activates.  Notifications are
not the same thing, because dismissing them can involve some kind of
loss.  If you want a notification that does not capture all input,
then we can work out a surface type for that.  If you really do want a
notification that does capture all input, then it's not a pop-up menu,
it's a modal dialog or similar, as we already have for password
prompts.

Cheers,
Daniel