X11 bashing

[Peter da Silva]

In article <16818 at chaph.usc.edu> jeenglis at alcor.usc.edu (Joe English) writes:
> peter at ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
> >[X implemented] basic drawing primitives and assumed that was good
> >enough. What they needed to be implementing was visual objects: buttons,
> >text panes, windows, etc.

> I think this is one of the things X definitely does right.
> It allows for much greater flexibility in UI style and policy.
> X is still used extensively for UI research, so this flexibility
> is important.

That's fine for research, but for people who are more interested in USING
the window system it's a loss. Also, it hurts flexibility in style and
policy if you're working with existing code: if the communication between
the client and the server is "open a text pane yea characters high and
so many characters wide" then you can have that be an Open Look, Motif, Mac,
PM, or any other UI text pane simply by changing the server: and all the
apps will automagically change.

This is where NeWS did it right. Pity.

> Actually, this was one of the original design decisions.
> "Tools, not rules" -- you can replace the toolkit
> if you want.  You can't do that on a Mac.

Meanwhile the uniform UI on the Mac has made it one of the most
productive environments for the end-user despite its own godawful
design flaws.

> If I remember right, the "..." in the >>ed line
> originally read something like "would consider X to be a
> usable environment for their needs."  Why did you ellipsis
> the quote?  It makes it look like you're disagreeing with
> Barry.

Because I'm disagreeing with Barry. His point was that X was faster
than NeWS and so more useful for animation and image processing.
-- 
Peter da Silva.  `-_-'  peter at ferranti.com
+1 713 274 5180.  'U`  "Have you hugged your wolf today?"