Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!nosc!ucsd!ucbvax!decwrl!jumbo!jg
From: jg@jumbo.dec.com (Jim Gettys)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.news
Subject: Re: Has X Won the Window Wars? (was Re: Is NeWS UseABLE?)
Message-ID: <13317@jumbo.dec.com>
Date: 1 Sep 88 16:39:46 GMT
References: <229.8808111329@jura.ritd.co.uk> <1082@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU> <66437@sun.uucp>
Reply-To: jg@jumbo.UUCP (Jim Gettys)
Organization: DEC Systems Research Center, Palo Alto
Lines: 76

In article <66437@sun.uucp> hvr@sun.UUCP (Heather Rose) writes:
>In article <1082@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU> jefu@pawl13.pawl.rpi.edu (Jeffrey Putnam) writes:
>>Me too.  But I would like to add that I think that the window has
>>essentially closed.  
>
>Alot of people said that UNIX would never catch on for alot of the same
>reasons that people are saying NeWS will not catch on: to unreliable,
>too hard to learn, too big.  But, as the
>market has demanded more performance, UNIX has caught on more and more.
>I think the same thing could happen with NeWS.  X11 has many very serious
>limitations that NeWS addresses.  And as people need more functionality
>and do not find it in X[foo], then they will chose a new windowing system
>which could be NeWS or whatever else is the wizziest thing on the market.

NeWS has serious limitations itself.  I used to be paid to write code that 
X supports easily, and NeWS is not able to support at all.  I personally
consider X's limitations, such as they are, less of a problem than
NeWS limitations, as they are.
>
>One thing X will have a big problem with is input from new devices 
>(according to Jim Gettys at the Bay Area X User's Group meeting).  NeWS
>has a very simple and clean input design which could be easily extended
>to receive input from any type of device.

What I have said on numerous occasions is that living with broken
"features" is a bad idea.  In the early V11 design, we included support
for multiple input devices, but found when  we implemented the design that
it was seriously flawed.  Rather than live with a bad design, we removed
this support in the core X specification.

People are working on X extensions now to "get it right", and support
your favorite knobs, dials, buzz boxes, etc.  For example,
look at the Digital VS8000, which has quite a complex button box.  I would 
hope that this becomes standardized soon; there are proposals on the
table for this now.  You are invited to review them.

>
>Another problem I see with X is lack of standards: no standard toolkit
>and no standard look and feel.  Whenever we have a new rev of X, we also
>have to have a whole new slew of toolkits...mostly a complete re-write.
>NeWS will have more stability in the next release with NDE and Open Look.

The toolkit intrinsics are now quite stable and available.  As for look
and feel, there are competing  "standards"; only time will tell
which of Xui, Open Look, etc. become the true standard.  But standards
form when people agree, and declaring something a "standard" does not
make it "the standard"  until such agreement is reached.

>And even with future releases of NeWS...it will not change much because
>it has been relatively well-designed in the first place.  Jim Gettys said
>that X was just a hacked together project that DEC latched on to. So even if a
>company were to write it's own toolkit in NeWS...that code would remain 
>much more constant across releases than an X toolkit.

I've never said X  was a hacked together project DEC latched onto; in
no location, at no time.

X up through version 10 was what a very small number (approximately 2-3)
people could do.  It was successful beyond our wildest dreams.  But rather
than allowing something that was seriously limited become so widely
used that it could not be dislodged, we completley redesigned X in version
11, and completely reimplemented it.  The redesign was done completely
openly, with input from many talented people in many companies.   This 
is hardly "hacked up".

>
>Heather Rose
>
>disclaimer:  of course these opinions are my own...nobody else would
>	want them!

Yup. And I'd recommend listening to what people actually say before
you quote someone.

				Jim Gettys
				Digital Equipment Corporation
				Systems Research Center