CSS on window borders experimental layout language

I’m happy to announce the first experimental version of Metacity with support for CSS window borders (“Cowbell”). This work was largely supported by Collabora Ltd.

You can:

• download the tarball;
• read the documentation (it’s not as boring as you might imagine);
• review the source history.

This diagram should explain everything, perhaps.

I would especially like to hear from:

• theme artists, to let me know whether it’s adequately powerful;
• anyone else interested in hacking on this with me;
• the GTK client-side decoration people, so that we can harmonise the way we represent things;
• people who know a lot about CSS and can offer insights into the suitability of the way we represent things;
• people who know a lot about the Dublin Core and can offer insights into whether our metadata system uses it appropriately;
• maintainers of other window managers (especially Mutter), so we can talk about including CSS support in other window managers;
• everyone else, to suggest which of the directions for future development are most interesting.

I think it may perhaps be helpful to set up a Cowbell mailing list, so that we can compare notes on implementations. For example, I haven’t written down anywhere how to place an image to the right of the title, which is commonly needed (you use border-image).

Photo © Craft*ology, cc-by-nc.