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From: dshr@SUN.COM (David Rosenthal)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Should NIST adopt the Xt Intrinsics?  (long)
Message-ID: <8908182349.AA00576@devnull.sun.com>
Date: 18 Aug 89 23:33:20 GMT
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 31

> 4)  Is ICCCM compliance important to application portability?
> 
ICCCM compliance is irrelevant to application portability,  in the
strict sense of taking your program from one machine to another and
compiling it,  and having it work in isolation (by which I mean
both before and after it is the only client connected to its
X server).

But,  of course,  this is not a realistic scenario.  For a program to
be useful after it has been ported,  it must coexist properly with
the other clients that will be using the X server at the same time.
(After all,  what is the point of a window system if you can only
run one client at a time?).  And it is this inter-operability that
conforming to the ICCCM is intended to provide.

The goal of the ICCCM is that a conforming client should inter-operate
correctly with any conforming window manager,  and should communicate
data through the selection mechanism with any other conforming client.
If you don't allow your users to choose their own window manager,
and you don't care about supporting cut-and-paste between clients,
then the ICCCM conventions don't affect your definition of
portability.  But I doubt that this is many people's definition.

X is a network window system,  and this means that if a client is available
on any machine on the net it is potentially usable by any X workstation
or terminal on the same net.  Thus,  there is a strong case for arguing that
the inter-operability of the ICCCM is a much more important consideration than
portability.  Inter-operating with a program is going to be MUCH cheaper than
porting it,  and its probably going to be done a lot more often.

	David.