David Jarvie wrote:
> But even worse is the difficulty in distinguishing where a dialog begins and 
> ends when it overlays another window. 

Yeah, the problem there is that it currently seems to
be designed to absolutely rely on compositing support
being there.

With compositing enabled, kwin draws differently sized
shadows for active vs. inactive windows, which provides
a border to windows. Plus it will dim the parent window
of a modal dialog window, funneling attention toward a
dialog box even more. Unfortunately unlike Apple - who
can get away without window borders at all - we can't
yet rely on compositing being enabled in the 4.0 time-
frame, I guess ...



-- 
Regards,
Eike Hein, hein@kde.org