On Fri, 2012-02-17 at 12:05 -0800, Bill Spitzak wrote: > Kristian Høgsberg wrote: > > >> 1) Are you planning to support on-screen keyboard apps? If so, how this > >> is going to be implemented, so that a malicious/compromised app couldn't > >> act as such "on-screen keyboard" and inject keystrokes to other apps? > > > > We can restrict access to functionality on a per-application basis. > > An on-screen keyboard would be part of the core ui and launched by the > > compositor in a way that gives it access to the "input event > > injecting" interface. > > I think a much easier way is that clients directly talk to the on-screen > keyboard application.
Exposing the virtual keyboard to the applications means you have to patch all toolkits that run on your platform, in order to support. Desktops usually allow all kind of toolkits. So having the virtual keyboard in the compositor allows it to support applications that use different toolkits. It also allows the compositor to restrict access to the active application, as Kristian mentioned. On top of that, the virtual keyboard (and possibly other input methods) only need to be launched once, if running inside the compositor. This can affect application start up time significantly (think of dictionaries and word engines that need to be initialized). Giving applications too much control over the virtual keyboard also makes it too easy for applications to simply provide their own, and then any form of platform consistency is gone. I think it's better to have a policy where toolkits need to implement the virtual keyboard support for Wayland and the applications don't have to do anything at all. That being said, there are a few use-cases where on-screen keyboard inside the application makes sense, but for the majority of use-cases, it's more beneficial to have it in the compositor (or even as a dedicated process, but still protected from direct application access). regards, Michael _______________________________________________ wayland-devel mailing list wayland-devel@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/wayland-devel
