[Cairo] Window manager

[Owen Taylor]

On Tue, 2003-08-05 at 15:05, Bill Spitzak wrote:
> On Tuesday 05 August 2003 05:26 am, Carl Worth wrote:
> 
> > As for "replacing the server" the same argument applies. Cairo won't
> > be able to significantly improve the appearance of applications
> > written to rely on the old model.
> 
> What I meant was a server that takes Cairo or something like it as a 
> communication protocol. Old applications would use an Xlib that translates 
> the old calls to Cairo, so this would allow improvements of their appearance.

What you are missing here is:

 A) You can't take a classic X line and turn it into a Cairo 
    anti-aliased polygon and claim to have any degree of compatibility.

 B) I think you'd be suprised by how little the appearance of classic
    X apps would improve. XDrawLine at angles other than 90 degrees and
    45 degrees simply doesn't occur in most X apps, because it looks
    awful. Even 45 degee lines are rare.

> Your same comments about the applications that use local image maps still 
> applies, nothing can do much about fixing that. However I don't think they 
> are used as often as you say, certainly every KDE and Gnome app draws all the 
> GUI controls using normal Xlib and Xft calls. Their "main display" may be an 
> image, but they can be told to print it themselves so it is ok if it looks 
> bad in a screen dump.

Depends on the theme. Certainly there are plenty of themes out there for
GTK+ that don't use a single line when drawing a button.

Regards,
					Owen