* Detecting desktop capabilities

* Abstract

	When applications wish to integrate well with different
desktop technologies, one approach is standardisation of every ISV
interface; another is to allow an application to detect, and integrate
with several different desktop interfaces. This specification presents
a simple way for applications to detect various preferred technology
sets for use in desktop integration.


* Specification

	An application has two ways to detect what desktop environment
it is running under, before it falls-back to some best-guess / default
mechanism. This mechanism forms an advisory (or 'hinting') function
only, many applications should never care about this variable.

	a) the 'DESKTOP' environment variable - this should be the
	   primary source of desktop information or
	b) the '_NET_DESKTOP' root window string, X property on screen
	   0 if the environment variable is not set.

	The 'DESKTOP' variable will take the form of a : separated
ordered list of technologies; with preferred mappings occuring from
the initial to the final elements.
	
* Defined Elements

	Clearly many technologies could be annotated and ordered in
the DESKTOP string; and we encourage this, however it is important to
ensure that a sufficiently unique name is chosen, and (preferably)
added to this specification.

	Registered technologies & names (alphabetical order):

	Toolkits:
		gtk, motif, qt, 

	Button order:
		button-corner, button-inset

	File Access:
		gnome-vfs, kio

	Element names must contain only lower-case alpha/numeric
characters using the ASCII.

* Examples

	In many cases, we would expect to see eg.

	   DESKTOP="button-inset:kio:qt" or perhaps
	   DESKTOP="button-corner:gnome-vfs:gtk"

	however more complex scenarios should be tolerated; for
example - if a user was concerned that a more powerful file access
layer was used if available, but preferring kio to gnome-vfs they
might specify:

	DESKTOP="button-inset:kio:gnome-vfs:qt"