What handle bars are good for:

[Markus Fleck <fleck informatik uni-bonn de>]

raster@redhat.com wrote:
> ->  Ok, so we have a detachable menu bar... not a bad idea in principle; by
> ->  detaching it I can prevent it from taking up space in my window, which
> ->  can be a good thing.

I see three real major uses for handle bars,
of which neither is (AFAIK) implemented in GNOME yet:

(1) Dockable/Floating Menus

    Menus or button bars can be moved to either edge of the working
    window, or can be free-floating over the window's workspace.
    This can be useful to have the menus or buttons closer to the
    position on the screen where you are currently working,
    sparing you from traveling annoyingly large distances
    with your mouse (in which case fast navigation would
    get increasingly difficult).

    For an implementation of this, look at KDE (or is it Qt).
    KDE doesn't allow you to drag menus, though - clicking on
    the handle just pops up a menu where you can chose one of
    the five possibilities mentioned above (n,e,s,w,floating).

(2) Switch-on/Switch-Off Menus

    Button bars or menu bars can be "switched" on and off as
    needed. Switched-off handles are represented by horizontal
    "handles" that can be clicked to show the full handle bars
    (with vertical handles) again.

    For an implementation of this, look at Netscape 4.
    MS Internet Explorer can also grow and shrink handle
    bars horizontally with the mouse by dragging handles.

(3) Panel

    There could be a way to drag handle bars into the GNOME
    panel. I'm not sure if this would be useful. In any case,
    this metaphor is different from (1) and (2) in that it
    would (probably) affect applications as a whole rather
    than just individual handle bars (of which a single
    window usually has several). But I'd rather vote for
    a separate "application drag-drop" button than for
    overloading the "handle box" metaphor here.

Just being able to drag menus out of windows and having them
free-floating (as it is now) doesn't really gain anything, IMHO. 
It's like a bad clone of the original idea without the benefits
of the original thing. Or is it?

Yours,
Markus.