trajano's Journal: My idea for yet another X replacement

If I were to build a replacement for the X window system I would do the following.

• Provide the concept of internal clients. These clients run within the local space of the X server and perform pass by reference calls instead of local remote calls, reducing the need for serialization costs
• Provide the concept of UI managers. These UI managers handle the drawing of buttons, scrollbars, etc.
• Provide support for pluggable XHTML parsers and renderers. These are used by the UI managers to render rich text into their widgets.
• It should still use the same method of client server communications as it is now. That means use SSH tunnelling in order to get it working over the firewall.
• X should provide the full user experience not just Window management, so it should support sound as well as other input methods.
• X should have support for a thin layer to the audio/video drivers.
• Remove the concept of low color screens and color maps from clients. It will provide 32-bit color (and render down as needed) as well as alpha blending.
• JPG and PNG renderers are built in
• The internal graphic format is PNG.
• SVG is used as its vector renderer.
• The all renderers (e.g. JPG, PNG, XHTML, and SVG) are hot-pluggable. However, at least one is present at all times.
• Fonts use OpenType format only.
• Should be backward compatible with X.
• Graphic and Audio Contexts can be exposed to local clients for increased rendering speed.
• Pluggable to existing windowing systems easily. So if we wanted an app to run on Windows we just need to put in a smallish daemon program that would translate them to Windows calls.