Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!bionet!arisia!roo!janssen From: janssen@parc.xerox.com (Bill Janssen) Newsgroups: comp.windows.x Subject: Re: where X went wrong Message-ID: Date: 11 Sep 90 00:57:07 GMT References: <142074@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <9009101202.AA04979@expo.lcs.mit.edu> Sender: news@parc.xerox.com Organization: Xerox PARC, Palo Alto, CA Lines: 28 In-reply-to: rws@EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU's message of 10 Sep 90 12:02:48 GMT The end users I've talked to don't have much interest in the "best of all worlds". They just want something that works, so they can get on with it. Any of the commercial toolkits available today would likely be acceptable to them. This point, coupled with the MIT X11Rx releases, has caused much consternation around the technical community. Many people who are ignorant of the history and goals of the X project expect "X" to give them a standard environment. Of course, the MIT X release has no standard environment. xterm works one way, typescript another; xemacs does not behave like idraw. But it is not so much "X" that has failed them, as it is the particular path to "X" that they have chosen. Perhaps there should be more advertisement of the fact that MIT X11Rx does not provide a windowing environment (in the Mac/MS-Windows/SunView sense of the term), but rather a toolset with which such an environment can be constructed, and one or two examples of what an environment might look like (eg. Andrew). Many sites are quite happy in standardizing on Motif or OpenLook, and treating their choice as *the* "X" system. Policy is provided, there is a standard toolkit, all the applications play together. Bill -- Bill Janssen janssen@parc.xerox.com (415) 494-4763 Xerox Palo Alto Research Center 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, California 94304