Ethan got me thinking there :-) consider a window consisting of text area and some widgets around it. instead of making the widgets as small as possible, render as margins when not needed.
most, or all, window's widgets would be rendered as solid background color (functionally margins) when user is reading or typing text. when user wants to activate any widget, actual menus, scrollbars, statusbar etc. would be drawn. if the user hovers mouse over widget area, it would be understood as intention to activate widgets, triggering their visibility. some symmetry of the left/right and perhaps top/bottom would be called for. one downside is that the widgets would literally `flash' in and out of user's vision, possibly irritating or tiring him. in other words, all the widgets (menus included) of an app turned into margins when mouse's /not/ over those widgets. -- dexen deVries [[[↓][→]]] For example, if the first thing in the file is: <?kzy irefvba="1.0" rapbqvat="ebg13"?> an XML parser will recognize that the document is stored in the traditional ROT13 encoding. (( Joe English, http://www.flightlab.com/~joe/sgml/faq-not.txt ))