Xr Renamed to Cairo

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."

Well now, that's just great.

[AntiOrganic]

That's all good and well, so when are we getting alpha-blending in X? It's really annoying having "almost" transparent terminals that copy my background.

eye candy?

[Anonymous Coward]

If I wanted eye candy, I'd buy a Mac...

Just give me a good, solid system to do my stuff on!

Re:Well now, that's just great.

[Rooktoven]

In some ways almost transparent is easier on the eyes. I know when I have 4 or 5 mac terminals open the overlay can be confusing-- not to mention if (assuming a dark background) a light colored application ends up behind a terminal.

I know it's nice for the "see what is possible" factor, but pseudo-transparency has it's place. I might even opt for it at times if I had the choice.

Finally, buffering.

[TheRaven64]

From the short term goals:

Provide an option to force backingstore on all windows.

This is the one I've been waiting for for a while. When RAM was $500 for 64K it made sense not to buffer windows, but now it is insane not to, forcing redraws which drain CPU and networt bandwidth (on remote displays).

Re:Well now, that's just great.

[Equuleus42]

I can't remember where I read this quote, but it went something like, "In the publishing industry, tons are spent and much effort is made to ensure that the paper is thick enough so that the reader can't see the words underneath the current page... In the computer industry, it seems that the effort spent is for the opposite effect." :^)

Re:Its not done right, but its a start

[aardvarkjoe]

This is 2003 and Linux should just go 100 percent SVG.

Linux should have nothing to do with either bitmaps or SVG. You mean that XFree86 should be 100% SVG. (Which I think is a stupid idea, by the way. Breaking backwards compatibility for the sake of "market domination" is something that Microsoft would do, not engineers who actually care about the technical side of things.)

Re:Who names these things?

[damiam]

Jaguar, XP, Outlook, KaZaA, QuickTime, Quartz, DirectX, etc., there are a million proprietary apps or technologies with nondescriptive names. Besides, no end user should ever have to hear about Cairo, they should just see good-looking graphics.

Re:Who names these things?

[nathanh]

In all seriousness, I think that poor name choices hurt the adoption of free software. Think about "Photoshop" vs. "The GIMP," or "Internet Explorer" vs. "Mozilla." Rather than something simple, descriptive, and catchy, we usually opt for indecipherable codenames, stupid recursive acronyms, or lame in-jokes that few people but the developers themselves will get.

Oh? So Excel just says "spreadsheet" to you? How about Quark Express? Or Oracle? Or Solaris? These names are only "obvious" because you have heard them before. There is nothing descriptive about them.

Re:eye candy?

[TRACK-YOUR-POSITION]

Steve Jobs doesn't want you to theme your Aqua eye candy--which kinda defeats the purpose, IMHO. Not to mention that Mac OS X doesn't let you exploit the most important benefit of vector graphics--resolution independence.

Re:Not eye candy!!!

[penguin7of9]

it offers possibilities to take advantage of and adapt to the available hardware. (server knows if the screen is only a 4" PDA screen, or a 30" 3D display - the application shouldn't have to know these things)

But the application has to know--scaling applications down to a PDA screen requires some hard choices to be made in terms of what is displayed. Merely scaling down the display won't help, and the server simply doesn't know enough about the application to do it automatically

- it's bandwith friendly if you're only transferring high-level info to/from the servers.

That is far from clear. Think of a grid bound to a large database table--does transferring all that data make sense? I don't think so. Not even on demand. In fact, even X11 may be too high-level in terms of bandwidth: VNC actually is often better in terms of bandwidth (but it is too low-level to be useful as a replacement for X11).

- you don't get different apps using different policies on the same server.

You get that on Windows and OS X. And Berlin were to catch on, people would port FLTK, Swing, wxWindows, and all those other toolkits to it as well.

The X11/toolkit/UI layering is completely standard and analogous to GDI/MFC/Explorer and Quartz/Cocoa/Aqua. The only difference is that X11 is well-designed and mature enough that there are, in fact, multiple commonly used toolkits and that those toolkits can even somewhat interoperate. That's a good thing.