Re: Panel is very broken, please revert.

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

> > Yeah. Although I'm still not sure if prelighting the panel is a good way
> > to indicate focus.
> 
> Feel free to blame me for this choice.  I am not sure what a better way
> would be, drawing a focus line around the whole thing seems even
> uglier and certainly a bit weird.  We don't have a good convention for
> indicating when focus is in a container but not in a specific child, it 
> seems to me, so prelighting seemed at least like something that would
> get noticed ;-)

In fact, as currently implemented I'm pretty sure its a bad way. Try
putting a workspace or a tasklist (aka window list) applet on a normal
panel. Now change windows or workspaces. The panel momentarily
highlights. Or try putting a mixer applet on. 

It highlights for a brief instant (short enough that its actually
bad...having elements on the screen flash is really to be avoided), then
displays the volume drag, but after you are done dragging the volume,
the panel highlights again. This is sort of a mysterious behavior, and I
doubt most users could explain it to you.

To demonstrate how it breaks an applet even MORE. Try adding the "Menu
Bar" applet. The menu bar applet is essentially broken to the point of
us not being able to use it by the prelighting (I think). When you click
on a menu, all the menus in the bar become raised (like they are
pre-lighted). Even if that were fixed I think its very disconcerting to
have something as large as the panel always mysteriously changing colour
on you. This is significant enough that we have not been pushing ahead
on plans to replace the foobar (i.e. menu panel) with a normal panel
with the menu applet locked onto it. *PLEASE* get this fixed so I can
continue working on this stuff.

Unless the "in focus" code is improved to avoid all these problems, the
indicator should be extremely subtle. For "normal" users having these
sorts of weird changes ocurring is rather annoying, and detrimental to
the feel of the desktop as a whole. I would suggest going with Alex's
idea of putting the focus onto widgets in the panel. Perhaps an ATK
event can be generated that will notify blind users that the panel is in
focus. I realize that won't work so well for other disabled users, but
the existing system sucks for the majority of users.

I hate to say this, but if these things can't be easily resolved, a
preference item may be in order. I think we need an accesibility
"capplet" anyway to collect preferences like these that most users can
just ignore, but its nice if users who need special accomodations can
find them all in one place.

-Seth

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