protected field instead of private for easy extending?

[fishBone000]

Just tried to extend WButton, because I want to make the button display foreground icon only, not background. But some fields of WButton is private, because of this I have to write a WButton on my own, or copy its code and worry about licensing before that (at least i need to search it), or workaround it in other ways.
I believe this happens to other widgets and classes as well.

Is it possible to make the fields protected instead of private? So that if modders want to modify the behavior of widgets provided by libgui, it would be much easier.

Thx!

[Juuxel]

All the fields of WButton have public getters.