[sprash]

No not really similar. It is basically a raw video that transfers the full window content over the wire.

X11 is capable of drawing primitives. Even though the most popular toolkits (Gtk, QT) sadly did not use them, those who did (e.g. Athena, Tcl/Tk) worked perfectly over the network, even modem lines.

If Wayland would contain modern drawing primitives like those that Cairo offers which could easily be serialized, we would have real network transparency even over slow low bandwidth connections.

[wmf]

It is basically a raw video that transfers the full window content over the wire.

Because that's more efficient.

If Wayland would contain modern drawing primitives like those that Cairo offers which could easily be serialized, we would have real network transparency even over slow low bandwidth connections.

Nope, drawing commands for a modern UI are more bytes than the window contents. This is a deeply counterintuitive topic and it's unfortunate that nobody implemented waypipe until recently so it was impossible to measure.

[sprash]

Any proof for this? I don't believe you. Every SVG is smaller than the rendered PNG counterpart. And SVG is a really inefficient way to serialize drawing commands.

Also including drawing into your Compositor (like Windows and MacOS do) gives you additional infinite scaling for free which would solve the multi dpi monitor problem.

[phkahler]

Very little modern software uses the X drawing functions. GTK uses Cairo, but so does X (that's where it came from, the library behind the X drawing API). But apps will use the GTK implementation of Cairo (client side) because it works on other platforms as well (windows and OSX). In most cases it doesn't actually make sense to put your drawing functions in the display server any more.

[DonHopkins]

Cairo wasn't the library behind the X11 drawing API, it was originally the Xr rendering extension, that was an alternative to the original X11 drawing API.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(graphics)

>The name Cairo derives from the original name Xr, interpreted as the Greek letters chi and rho.

You're right, it doesn't actually make sense to put your drawing functions in the display server any more (at least in the case of X11, which doesn't have an extension language to drive the drawing functions -- but it did make sense for NeWS which also used PostScript as an extension language as well as a drawing API).

So Cairo rose above X11 and became its own independent library, so it could be useful to clients and toolkits on any window system or hardware.

https://www.osnews.com/story/3602/xr-x11-cross-device-render...

https://web.archive.org/web/20030805030147/http://xr.xwin.or...

https://keithp.com/~keithp/talks/xarch_ols2004/xarch-ols2004...

Here's some email discussion with Jim Gettys about where Cairo came from:

From: Jim Gettys <[e-mail]> Date: Jan 9, 2007, 11:04 PM

The day I thought X was dead was the day I installed CDE on my Alpha.

It was years later I realized the young turks were ignoring the disaster perpetrated by the UNIX vendors in the name of "standardization"; since then, Keith Packard and I have tried to pay for our design mistakes in X by things like the new font model, X Render extension, Composite, and Cairo, while putting stakes in the heart of disasters like XIE, LBX, PEX, the old X core font model, and similar design by committee mistakes (though the broken core 2D graphics and font stuff must be considered "original sin" committed by people who didn't know any better at the time).

So we've mostly succeeded at dragging the old whale off the beach and getting it to live again.

From: Don Hopkins <[e-mail]> Date: Wed, Jan 17, 2007, 10:50 PM

Cairo looks wonderful! I'm looking forward to using it from Python, which should be lots of fun.

A lot of that old X11 stuff was thrown in by big companies to shill existing products (like using PEX to sell 3d graphics hardware, by drawing rotating 3-d cubes in an attempt to hypnotize people).

Remember UIL? I heard that was written by the VMS trolls at DEC, who naturally designed it with an 132 column line length limitation and no pre-processor of course. The word on the street was that DEC threw down the gauntlet and insisted on UIL being included in the standard, even though the rest of the committee hated it for sucking so bad. But DEC threatened to hold their breath until they got their way.

And there were a lot of weird dynamics around commercial extensions like Display PostScript, which (as I remember it) was used as an excuse for not fixing the font problems a lot earlier: "If you want to do readable text, then you should be using Display PostScript."

The problem was that Linux doesn't have a vendor to pay the Display PostScript licensing fee to Adobe, so Linux drove a lot of "urban renewal" of problems that had been sidelined by the big blundering companies originally involved with X.

>So we've mostly succeeded at dragging the old whale off the beach and getting it to live again.

Hey, that's a lot better than dynamiting the whale, which seemed like a such good idea at the time! (Oh the humanity!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtVSzU20ZGk

From: Jim Gettys <[e-mail]> Date: Jan 17, 2007, 11:41 PM

> Cairo looks wonderful! I'm looking forward to using it from Python, which should be lots of fun.

Yup. Cairo is really good stuff. This time we had the benefit of Lyle Ramshaw to get us unstuck. Would that I'd known Lyle in 1986; but it was too late 3 years later when I got to know him.

https://cairographics.org/bibliography/

[dan-robertson]

I would be careful about describing cairo’s Primitives as modern. Cairo-style rendering apis and implementations are struggling to keep up with modern user interfaces and modern resolutions. It isn’t super clear which way 2d rendering apis will go in future. It seems silly to me to bake such an assumption into a protocol

[gmueckl]

What realistic alternative designs are there?