COMPOUND_TEXT versus UTF8_STRING

Lubos Lunak l.lunak at suse.cz
Wed Sep 22 10:59:30 PDT 2004


On Wednesday 22 of September 2004 18:43, Keith Packard wrote:
> Around 18 o'clock on Sep 22, Roland Mainz wrote:
> > It is not easy to get rid of COMPOUND_TEXT since many X11 specs have to
> > be rewritten/updated to do that. And backwards-compatibility to existing
> > (binary) applications is required, too.
>
> We don't have to eliminate it, but we should make sure the standards all
> have some way of using UTF8 instead and mark the COMPOUND_TEXT (and STRING)
> support as 'obsolete' so that application developers are encouraged to use
> the more modern methods.

 The "window caption and utf" thread on the wm-spec list seems to be about why 
_NET_WM_NAME was introduced : 
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/wm-spec-list/1999-July/thread.html
 This mail http://mail.gnome.org/archives/wm-spec-list/1999-July/msg00110.html 
from Owen Taylor explains quite well in short the various possibilities.

 I think the only possibility to keep backwards compatibility is to add new 
properties and support the old ones, just like in the EWHM.

>
> Adopting the EWMH as an X.org standard might be a good place to start.

 Does that mean we'll have to remove the leading undescores from all the atom 
names ;) ?

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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