Transparent panel thoughts

[Olivier Fourdan]

On Wed, 2004-11-17 at 12:08 -0800, Brian J. Tarricone wrote:
> the WM doesn't treat the panel in any "special" way, it just sees it as
> another dock-type window.  i *think* what you want here is essentially
> special-casing the panel in some way, which is a definite no-no.  i could
> be wrong though.

Actually that is perfectly doable with minimal changes, since the struts
are set by the application (the panel in that case).

The panel could very simply set struts that define an area that is the
half of the actual height of the panel (that would still depend on the
panel orientation and placement, but it wouldn't be much of a problem).

The main issue I see with this is rather that the composite extension is
pretty new and doesn't always work as expected. Let's not forget that
compositing manager in xfwm4 is disabled by default (and unless proven
the contrary, I see nothing wrong with teh implementation in Xfce), and
none of the bugs I've entered in freedesktop.org's bugzilla have been
taken into account yet.

Therefore, I don't think we should count on the transparency of the
panel.

Plus I don't think the environnement should behave differently when such
an option is enabled or disabled. The environment should behave the
same, with or without the optional features.

At last, don't forget that transparency doesn't let the mouse click go
through (yeah, I know it sounds obvious when I say that), so placing
windows behind a semi-transparent panel would cause a usability problem
IMO.

All in all, I think it's not a  good idea :)

Cheers,
Olivier.