Multi{pointer,touch} & Userspace

[Jim Gettys]

On Thu, 2008-10-30 at 08:15 +1100, Daniel Stone wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 11:20:53AM -0400, Jim Gettys wrote:
> > I've also been wondering about the relative merit its of an ad-hoc wire
> > format (such as you've defined) for events versus something like XML,
> > where parsers and extensibility is known.
> 
> Known to be unbelievable overkill, yes.  Not to mention that you cannot
> do parsing of anything other than a full document, so a single pointer
> movement blows out to:

.... long verbose xml elided....

A little insanity now and again allows one to learn...

But before I discard it out of hand, I've been investigating the state
of EXI and XML schemas, etc.  The text format of XML is far from
wonderful, though compression is, as you might imagine, very effective
at reducing the bytes on the wire. But other representations are being
worked on.

I'll have more of an opinion by Tuesday if I'm nuts or not, after I've
met with Philippe Le Hegaret.

I'm trying to avoid my innate biases of 25 years (similar to yours) from
reinventing wheels again for the N'th time.

My motivation is that touch devices can provide much more complex data
than devices we've had to deal with in the past (up to and including
full images), that may need multiple levels of interpretation (depending
on the sophistication of the targeted application).
                             - Jim


-- 
Jim Gettys <jg at laptop.org>
One Laptop Per Child