X11 fullscreen

[Daniel Stone]

On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 10:53:11AM +1100, Russell Shaw wrote:
> Glynn Clements wrote:
> > Russell Shaw wrote:
> >> Forget widget toolkits. They're totally lame wrappers that hide
> >> all the useful functionality from you, run like a waterlogged
> >> sheep, and otherwise assume you don't want to get anything really
> >> nontrivial running this month.
> > 
> > On the contrary, using bare Xlib you would be hard pressed to write
> > even a trivial application within a month unless you're willing to
> > give up a lot of features which many people would take for granted
> > (e.g. configuration, support for multiple locales, interoperability
> > with other applications, etc).
> > 
> > As with many things, being different is automatically a loss, so you
> > have to do better on the other aspects just to break even.
> 
> One can make their own widget libraries based on Xlib, then write apps
> using the libraries. Nothing hard about that ("hard" is relative;)

It's not 'hard' in the sense of being groundbreaking CS research, no,
but it would take an immense amount of time to get non-Western scripts
(including bidi), accessibility, copy & paste, full ICCCM compliance
including doing the right thing with EWMH, input (including input
methods), selections, etc working properly and correctly.  Oh, and your
app doesn't look anything like any other app now.

Ooh yeah, and your app has no concept of double-clicking.  You could
reimplement it and have it be completely different to the rest of the
system (different maximum time between clicks, different maximum
distance between click positions, etc) if you like.  All the little
stuff like this really does add up.

Please, please, stop telling people to write their own toolkits; it's
quite possibly the worst advice I've ever heard on this list, to be
honest.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg/attachments/20100129/44ccc2ea/attachment.pgp>