unity-design team mailing list archive

[Ted Gould <ted@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2010-06-09 at 12:28 +0800, Sam Spilsbury wrote:
> > On Wed, 2010-06-09 at 10:18 +0800, Sam Spilsbury wrote:
> >> As far as I know, with martin's NETWM idea to have the decorator paint
> >> the "behind" of the window, this basically means that the window can
> >> be reparented at 0x0 in the decoration, rather than the offset of the
> >> decoration. This means that they are free to draw whatever they want
> >> on top of the decoration (tabs, particles, etc) and have it all blend.
> >>
> >> Developers would be nice though *cough*.
> >
> > First, Sam thanks for explaining this.  I was confused on the NETWM
> > idea.  And I guess that I still am a little.  If the application can
> > draw over the decorations, what gain in consistency is there by not
> > having the application theme draw the decorations themselves?  It seems
> > like having two theme engines just for fun at that point.
> 
> It allows for consistency of decorations while allowing consistency
> between the application and the decoration. The whole idea is to have
> a NETWM (or EWMH as it goes by) spec which the application sets when
> only painting it's decoration on a window with an alpha channel (and
> then not painting the usual grey or cream colored background). With
> this setup, you'll get a consistent background look to all the
> applications and a consistent background look between the decoration
> and the window, whilst retaining the benefits of having the window
> manager reparent the window into a decoration and have a consistent
> control for all the windows.

It seems like you'd still need two deeply integrated theme engines
though.  And, in the case of multiple toolkits, deeply integrated
between them as well if this was ever going to look in anyway
reasonable.

I just don't understand why having two theme engines is better than one.

		--Ted

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