Originally Posted by Ailae
How would you attach your secure handler to "a target" then? Attaching it to a nameplate would mean to move it accordingly, which you can't do in combat. And there really is no other way to attach it in the 3D world.
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ultimately, i think it would have to be attached to the nameplate. detecting when there is a mouseover target, and identifying the associated nameplate (if enabled, within nameplate range, visible on the screen, and not the current target... see below) would be possible, via inspection of all visible nameplates for an "active" highlight region. i don't think having a control like this serve as an interlocutor for spellcasting would require secure frames (would it? especially if you built macros for the mouseover unit dynamically, up front... the author of an action-bar addon would likely be able to say for certain; for instance, can Macaroon activate an action bar when the "mouseover" unitid becomes active, and hide it when the unitid becomes inactive?). creating/initializing extra graphical objects, associating them with the base nameplate frame assembly, and generically detecting mouse activity on them is all possible in combat.
but in addition to nameplates being enabled (i.e. via "keybinding"), nameplate range (currently at 40 yards, hardcoded into the WoW Client), and simple world-frame visibility/clipping...
the fact (and the exception to all of the above) is that the current target nameplate is "dead" to the mouse (hardcoded into the WoW Client; Blizzard added this "feature" sometime around WoW 3.3, if memory serves). mouseover events on the current target nameplate would not be flagged (the highlight region doesn't activate, and you would have to mouse over the current target 3D model even just to have a unitid), and while i have not ever tried an active control of any kind, it would be my expectation that you would not be able to get anything associated with the current target nameplate frame assembly to answer to mouse-clicks. i.e. even if you could pop up your nameplate-attached toolbar on mouseover, nothing on it would respond to mouse-clicks.
that would tend to limit the value of something like this.
now that i think of it, this is probably all a Blizzard plot... they have been making it progressively harder for "targeting aid" addons of all kinds (and a per-unit action bar that popped up on mouseover would definitely qualify as a "targeting aid", i think). disclaimer: have a PvE-centric perspective on this.
my $0.02.