> At 5:57 PM 10/6/93 -0700, Bill Janssen wrote:
> >I've never thought that
> >one particular viewer should be privileged. Perhaps the `browser'
> >shouldn't even have a viewer window, and all documents should be viewed
> >externally. In some ways, this is what window managers were intended
> >for.
> Ack!!! That's exactly what I don't want, tons and tons of windows because I
> have to use an external viewer for every different content type (document)
> I open and even those external viewers force you to have a different window
> for each document. I wouldn't complain so loudly if the most common window
> managers did a half decent job of letting you navigate around more than a
> handful of windows, but they don't.
So write a better window manager. Nothing in the protocol keeps you
from doing it the Mac way, for instance. Or trade your X11 system for a
Mac. :-)
Another option is to lobby for a modest change to toolkits, so that the
user, when invoking a program, can specify the window which the
application will use. If, say, both ghostscript and xv knew how to do
this, a browser like XMosaic could easily use the same window for HTML
(via its own parser/viewer), Postscript, and images. What a win! By
the way, neither ghostscript nor xv are built with a standard toolkit;
each uses xlib more or less directly.
Bill