Re: Is Alpha Channel support in next release plan?

[Christof Petig <christof petig-baender de>]

Michael Torrie wrote:
> Also, if there are animations
> underneath, they don't come through, since the alpha stuff isn't live.

Good point. But it really hurts to see eye candy features in competing 
toolkits when their gtk support has not even started. I'd even dance 
with joy if we had had this dirty hack avaible!

> In short, the widget set (Gtk) is not the place for this right now.  It
> has to be in the window system.

But it has to be in gdk, too. AFAIK it is not possible to make widgets 
partially translucent (e.g. entries within a container which has a 
background image). So even if X11 needs work to support translucent 
windows, gdk needs some work which will not hurt to have before the X11 
feature is available.

I'd love to see partially translucent entries and translucent containers 
with tooltips (tooltip means xwindow, this seem to imply opacity).

I even offer time to help implementing (but not before Nov).

> I think that a special OpenGL extension to X11 could be created that
> would make this type of thing possible.

I dare to say that the timely availability of this feature will be an 
indicator of X11's ability to meet future demands and whether it stays 
the graphics infrastructure of choice for linux. [And similar applies to 
gtk.]

   Christof