Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!apple!sun!quintus!pds
From: pds@quintus.UUCP (Peter Schachte)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: XSetWindowAttr. ,XWindowAttr structures not symetric
Message-ID: <1050@quintus.UUCP>
Date: 10 May 89 22:08:14 GMT
References: <8905082300.AA04850@ATHENA.MIT.EDU> <8905100036.AA01409@PIT-MANAGER.MIT.EDU>
Reply-To: pds@quintus.UUCP (Peter Schachte)
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Inc.
Lines: 24

In article <8905100036.AA01409@PIT-MANAGER.MIT.EDU> jik@ATHENA.MIT.EDU ("Jonathan I. Kamens") writes:

[about why it's not necessary to be able to determine a window's background]

>presumably you are only going to be drawing in windows that
>you've created with your application, since it is usually considered
>somewhat rude to draw in windows that belong to other programs.  Since
>you've created the window, shouldn't you know what its foreground and
>background colors are?

Not necessarily.  A well-modularized program may want to have a module
that takes a window from some other module without having to know
anything about it.  Perhaps it wants to change its background to red
until some circumstance has changed, and then change it back.  Or maybe
it wants to change the border pattern and change it back later.  More
likely still, it might want to temporarily change its cursor.  Unless
I've missed something, none of this is possible.

This is one of X11's holes.

-- 
-Peter Schachte
pds@quintus.uucp
...!sun!quintus!pds