Around 14 o'clock on Mar 5, Alexander Gelfenbain wrote:
> There is nothing in STSF architecture that makes it client-side or > server-side. It can be either or both. ST Font Server / ST Client Library > client-server model has nothing to do with X11 client-server model. ST > architecture defines that both ST Client Library and ST Font Server should > always reside on the same machine and communicate via the fastest protocol > available (UNIX sockets, Solaris doors, or whatever.) I don't think this is completely accurate. If you can learn anything from the experiences that 17 years of deployment among dozens of existing X applications can teach, you'll see that whatever API you create will be insufficient for some non-trivial set of applications. The ST API may solve 90% of the problems for applications, but failing to provide for that additional 10% means that we'll continue to have applications working around the existing font infrastructure rather than cooperating with it. A well designed client-side API would permit applications to take advantage of most of the available font services while replacing those inappropriate for their system, sharing configuration and customization data along with rendering infrastructure and other subsystems. > In its client-side mode STSF can act as a replacement for Xft. The > server-side implementation of STSF - XST is an X11 extension implementation > of STSF API. Xft provides functionality which is isomorphic to STSF -- STSF would be implemented on top of Xft instead of as a replacement. All that Xft does is connect the standard XFree86 glyph rasterizer API (FreeType) to the X server. Xft provides a useful abstraction by eliminating any dependency on the Render extension for client-side text, it doesn't perform any text layout or font selection. > We would like not to get into client-fonts vs server-fonts flamewar and > would prefer to concentrate on discussing the usefulness and the > sufficiency of ST API for modern applications, be it implemented on the > server side or on the client side. As we've seen through the years, any API we design for text will be insufficient for some significant class of applications. Any new text API must initially be judged in how well it will work with applications that aren't satisfied by it's capabilities. A server-side ST architecture is no better than the core X protocol in that regard. A transparent client-side implementation of an ST-like system would have a fundementally different API architecture than what you've proposed today. Any discussion on the current API cannot usefully proceed in the absence of concensus on this issue. Keith Packard XFree86 Core Team Compaq Cambridge Research Lab _______________________________________________ Fonts mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/fonts
