Extending EWMH beyond application windows

[Tommi Komulainen]

On Sat, 2004-08-21 at 05:58, ext Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-08-20 at 11:42, Tommi Komulainen wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > Could the EWMH properties and client messages be extended to cover
> > different views inside an application window as well, where applicable? 
> > A view being like a tab in tabbed browser, or different mode in PIM
> > application (mail, calendar, ...)
> > 
> > I mean, where EWMH talks about root and application windows, it could in
> > my opinion by extension cover also application window and its views as
> > well.  Semantics should be quite identical.  This would allow making
> > more information available to pagers and task lists and the like.
> > 
> > Is this making any sense?
> > 
> 
> In principle, sure; in practice I think it's pretty insane complicated,
> because apps vary so much in how all this is implemented. In any case
> you'd first have to figure out what UI you were trying to enable
> pagers/tasklists to provide.

I'm not sure about it being complicated.  It's just a bunch of
properties and client messages the application manages, I don't see any
strict constraints for actual implementations.  And in widget toolkits
one could easily map the messages to widgets, still leaving the actual
implementation details for the application.  Or provide a convenience
API that handles everything automatically.

I think one possible UI would have parallel with tasklist that does
window grouping.  Or you could have a separate tasklist that just shows
the views in currently focused application (window.)


-- 
Tommi Komulainen                              tommi.komulainen at nokia.com