Xr Renamed to Cairo 216
Charles Goodwin writes "Xr, the vector graphics extension for XFree86 that Keith Packard, Carl Worth, and a few others have been hard at work on, has been renamed and is now officially called Cairo. Keith and Carl recently gave a detailed presentation on Cairo (then known as Xr) which should be a useful read for those wishing to understand it a little better. There is already a useful Gtk+ rendering backend that uses Cairo, as well as an SVG test suite. This, along with Gnome2's subtle adoption of SVG and the inception of Xouvert (which now has goals for both the short term and long term, and an initial plan which includes coexisting with XFree86), spells a bright future for the eye candy of an X desktop."
KDE3? (Score:5, Informative)
The big issue with an alpha layer is that someone has to have the authority to impliment such a change in the X11 protocol, it can't be done as an extension. Anyone who uses the fucked up protocol won't be able to display their app on a different X server. This breaks compatibility with thin clients.
What I want is complete revamping of the X protocol with backward compatibility maintained (permanently), such that new apps can take advantage of new server-side widgets without breaking compatibility. Wouldn't it be sweet if GTK+ apps could run as well over a 256kb/s line as XAW apps do?
This might even turn out better than expected (Score:5, Informative)
They even plan to contact Freedesktop.org.
Re:KDE3? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:WTF? (Score:3, Informative)
Technology, not XP (Score:1, Informative)
Microsoft's Cairo was a project of the 90s which started off as an operating system but became a set of technologies. Some of Cairo went into NT 4.0, more into Windows 2000, while some parts like an Object Oriented were never finished. Longhorn (XP's successor) had it's plan of a distributed file system downgraded down to a service running on NTFS.
The three main portions of the technology were: Expanded Directory Services, Object-Based File System, and Expanded integration with DNS.
Re:Finally, buffering. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Cairo? Bill Gates will be contacting them. (Score:3, Informative)
Cairo was never the codename for NT anyway, it was the codename for the Object Oriented File System microsoft was working on that was going to go into Win2k.
Re:Not eye candy!!! (Score:5, Informative)
X11 doesn't support "vector graphics" any more or less than it used to. What has changed is that X11 now has an imaging model similar to PostScript (subpixel addressing, antialiasing, etc.) in addition to its older bitblit model (pixel-accurate, using boolean operations for drawing).
(Subpixel addressing also allows you to do zoomable or "resolution independent" graphics, while the bitblit model is resolution dependent. However, the term "resolution independent" is somewhat of a misnomer--even if your imaging model supports arbitrary zooming, you can't just zoom user interfaces up and down and expect them to be usable.)
When people talk about "vector graphics" in the context of window systems, that usually means the use of display lists: you give the server a list of "objects" to display (lines, triangles, rectangles, etc.), and the server takes care of displaying them when needed. But they might mean something else as well.
Display lists in X11 are still handled the way it has always been handled: by client-side libraries. Eventually, there may be a server-side extension for handling display lists and perhaps even the ability to transfer display lists and structured graphics in the form of SVG data. That would give you Quartz-like redrawing and rescaling, although while that looks nice it has few real advantages.
Now, what about Berlin vs. X11? First of all, one big thing in Berlin is the incorporation of GUI components into the server. That is an anathema to X11 designers. Also, while resolution-independent graphics is nice (the same thing X11 now supports with Cairo), it is a poor choice as the only graphics model: well-designed application for low-resolution and/or low-depth screens (e.g., a 160x160 Palm) must be able to draw with pixel-accurate drawing operations and precisely predictable results on every bit on the screen.
I don't think Berlin "got it right". Berlin concentrated on the obvious, convenient, clean, high-level stuff. Berlin would give you slick-looking OS X-like desktops if it ever caught on, but the Berlin designers have neglected the other imaging models that are really important to real window systems, and they have put way too much policy into the server.
Fortunately, the way X11 is evolving, we won't have to make a choice: you can have all the slick antialiased, structured graphics you like, and yet still have pixel-accurate drawing in a bounded memory X11 implementation. The only difference will be that X11 still won't enforce policy on the server side, and that's a good thing as far as I am concerned. But the market will decide that issue.
In fact, we have no idea what kind of possibilities may open up here. If we're unlucky, yes, it might be a can of worms...
There is no "can of worms". We have had window systems with antialiased drawing, structured graphics, and all that at least since the 1980s; maybe you remember NeXT and NeWS. The feature is nice, but it doesn't radically change what people do with GUIs.
X r == "Cairo" (Score:5, Informative)
X == Chi
r == Rho
Okay
Re:Who names these things? (Score:4, Informative)
"P" is the closest thing we have to the greek letter rho, which phonetically is "R." The "P" sound is taken by the greek letter pi.
Since Xr is written by people who speak English, not ancient Greek, it is likely that they're taking the letters from the modern alphabet, not the greek one. Therefore using the letters "Chi Rho" make sense when doing the translation into greek - since such translation is almost always done phonetically.