11 Oct
2011
11 Oct
'11
6:32 p.m.
On 11/10/11 2:16 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:
I'm not saying it's clever, or that I do it myself. But it is happening
on a massive scale.
Do you expect to be using X11 in *another* 20 years?
There's a lot of representations that binary isn't terribly good for. A
good use for binary is, as you mentioned, gzipping a text format. :)
Before you object - There are exceptions, of course, where binary is a
good idea...
--Toby
On that we agree!
-Dave
On 10/10/2011 08:51 PM, Toby Thain wrote:
Of course. But that's a website. We're talking about windowing systems
and local (or "slightly remote") apps.
What's the difference between a web site (which blurs readily these days
into "web application"... Google Docs... GitHub... Twitter...) and a
"remote app"?
Further,
that low-level "mechanism, not policy" architecture of X is one
of its big points of existence. An X display can look and act like
ANYTHING.
And that's the problem. For most uses, the detailed design of widgets
doesn't matter. You just want a CHECKBOX here, a TEXT field here, and a
SUBMIT button there. Good enough for Amazon, at least, which is a
non-trivial UI. Plenty of other examples too.
Further, toolkits that sit ON TOP OF X give you all that functionality.
They starte with Xt, went through Motif, going all the way up nowadays
to gtk. CHECKBOX here, TEXT field there, and a SUBMIT button
there...except that it's actually fast, and looks a hell of a lot better.
Then why doesn't the web look just like Motif, since the web offers
everyone unprecedented aesthetic freedom??
Until the www shows itself too embarrassingly
incapable of this, you are
going to be stuck with "cloud" app providers like Google.
*I* am? No, I'm not. I use OpenOffice (erm, "LibreOffice", thank you
Oracle) for stuff like that. Anyone who embraces the idea of storing
business-proprietary documents on someone else's network, especially
when they happen to be experts in large-scale data mining, needs to have
their head examined.
Besides, such "cloud apps" don't seem to have much market penetration.
I've had precisely one client ask about them, and when I explained how
they work (the whole "hand your documents to a search engine company"
angle), his response was something like "Oh wow...FUCK THAT!"
You haven't done much Lisp, have you. ;)
Quite enough to know you're wrong on that. :)
And have you seen what they've done with JavaScript performance lately?
And noticed that all these supposedly exotic languages are often faster,
now, than old, boring C? Look around... Lisp family languages included.
Seen what Erlang can do? And, more importantly, they're much more
productive to develop in.
So your
logic is that it's ok if it's bloated and inefficient, because
we can just compress it? That sounds like the Lispers' arguments that
the performance problems associated with Lisp have been "solved" because
computers are faster now.
(Lisp doesn't have any performance problem, but that's another thread...) No, I am saying that the web is architecturally
efficient, at least
potentially, because it allows complete flexibility in protocol and
front-end decoding. The protocol you like - doesn't.
Ha! That's like saying IDE is better than SCSI because IDE doesn't
require those pesky terminators and SCSI does. "The web" allows that
flexibility because, after a few lines of headers are sent, it's just a
raw TCP connection!
I'm not talking about gzip. I'm talking
about compression *in general*
which means designing your vocabulary and operations to suit the domain
in question. X11 cannot do this, it's at least one level removed from
this flexibility - but systems like NeWS *can* too (at least to my
recollection), and they made X11 look crummy at the time.
Ok, I understand your point now. On the point you weren't trying to
make, one thing I really liked was the Cisco compression PAM, but sadly
almost nobody bought it.
There were certainly windowing systems that had some technical
advantages over X11, but X11 won. It's ironic that the big negative
about X11 was always its bandwidth requirements, but web-based UIs'
bandwidth requirements are orders of magnitude worse, and nobody notices
this and complains about it because people with that much technical clue
nowadays are few and far between. JSON is a compact format but not the only one
possible.
I wouldn't call it compact at all, but that's a relative matter. I deal
with lots of binary protocols. Gads,
man. I'm not talking about using X11 to somehow "replace" the
friggin' WWW. I'm talking about using it from DOWNSTAIRS.
Wifi sucks. :)