10 Oct
2011
10 Oct
'11
5:02 p.m.
On 10/10/2011 06:56 PM, Toby Thain wrote:
That's too low level for most stuff, as the web has all but proven.
I don't even know where to begin with this. It's a total apples vs.
oranges comparison.
"Proven"? How, exactly? "The web" isn't a replacement for a
windowing system any more than Windows is a replacement for an
oscilloscope. You're comparing apples and oranges, and while I don't
know you very well, I damn well know you know THAT. In fact, I've
concluded that you're just bored and know I won't let completely stupid
and/or patently false statements just float by.
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.
There are too many respectable people on this list who DON'T know
much about this stuff to play with the possibility of misleading them here.
X11 was never designed to be used from one continent to another, and
the WWW was never designed to be the exclusive way that humans interact
with computers. That whole "wasn't designed for it" is precisely why
neither of them work very well in that capacity.
Errr... that's not quite as obvious as you imply. :)
The web offers massive opportunities for compression, that X11, RDP,
VNC, etc, can't match, in having a client side processing environment
and complete flexibility in data formats...
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.
And it's too bad those "opportunities" for compression aren't being
taken advantage of, save for the web servers with the Apache compression
option enabled. And there are, what, maybe six of those? The fact is,
that stuff CAN be compressed, since it's all fat inefficient text, but
it almost never IS compressed on the wire.
Next...will JSON and AJAX (etc, whatever the kids come up with next
week) really deal with compressed objects, or is this argument dependent
upon bandwidth providers handling that compression for you, by having to
build compression support into all of the end-user "routers" that are
terminating lines everywhere? At the server/browser level, then? (which
is probably the only practical place to do it, now that I've typed that)
Gads, man. I'm not talking about using X11 to somehow "replace" the
friggin' WWW. I'm talking about using it from DOWNSTAIRS.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
New Kensington, PA
X11 just does not satisfy me as a way to define a
high-information-content user interface. It's certainly capable of
delivering a high-information-content user interface but it doesn't
define it.
I agree with the latter, but for the former, it does satisfy me. (that's
not to say that I think it should satisfy you) There's really nothing
that can be done on a graphics display that X cannot do in one way or
another, in an almost entirely device- and architecture-independent way.
It's goal is not to "define" user interfaces, but to provide a mechanism
for creating them. The web by itself isn't too fancy but couple with
Javascript, AJAX,
SVG and other high-information-value media of interchange, and boy is
it fun to work in! With just a little care, apps scale up enormously
and deploy with so little effort on my part.
Yes, some of the stuff they're abusing the protocols and bandwidth to do
are pretty impressive. Using them, however, TO ME, feels like riding a
bike with square wheels. X is a pretty "heavy" protocol in terms of
bandwidth utilization, but it's positively miserly when compared to XML
or JSON!