Re: [xougen] con of server side widgets

[weigelt]

On Mon, Sep 01, 2003 at 12:08:20PM -0400, William Lahti wrote:

> How would we handle animated widgets on the server side?
What kind of animation do you have in mind ?

If you're talking about such things like buttons changing colors
when mouse moves over them - this could be handled quite good.

For example we could define such things in similar way like CSS 
works on Websites. Such a description for a button widget could 
look like this in an text presentation (which of course is not 
necessarily that what goes over the net ...):

BUTTON.button1
{
    border:             1px solid black;
    border-decoration:  3dbox;
    font-color:         black;
    font-weight:        bold;
    padding:            2px 2px 2px 2px;
    background:         solid grey;
}

BUTTON:FOCUS.button1
{
    border:             3px solid black;
}

BUTTON:HOVER.button1
{
    background:         solid lightgrey;
}

BUTTON:PRESSED.button1
{
    border-decoration:  3dbox inverse;
    background:         solid lightgrey;
}


This stylesheets could be stored as resouces on the Display Server, 
as well as other things like pixmaps. Each widget or group may 
reference its own stylesheet. 

Such an stylesheetet widget engine could be implemented on many sides,
i.e. as server module (controlled by an appr. protocol extension),
as an client lib (i.e. gtk-like) or as an separate application, controlled
by another protocol (i.e. for web-widgets).

All variants share the same idea and styling scheme.

<snip>
> again, I don't think it would be bad if there were a dedicated widget 
> server that produced a pixmap of a widget based on a list of properties.
This should only be _one_ variant (i.e. to enable displaying of widget-
based applications via web but w/o java applets), but if the server supports
this, it would be quite a benefit especially for low-resource environments.

> Simple enough? We could begin doing this now, without any changes to the 
> X server and get a very similiar result to adding a bunch of new code to it.
> The widget server could be distributed with Xouvert. 
ACK. 
This would be an good starting point. Someday we'll have it stable enough
to think about a direct integration into the Xserver and perhaps creating
an new extension of the X protocol.

> will volunteer, but is any one else interested? Im guessing you'll need to 
> know C and socket programming (as well as some X stuff for using shared 
> pixmaps if available). 
I'll be with you :)

Since it is not really (yet) an X project, we should move out to a separate
list and only post regulary reports to this one. I'd offer to host it, 
for me its an job of 1 minute ...

At this point an important job would be aquiring new developers for this
project. There are some similar projects out there, which we could ask
to work together with us. Could you contact them ?

cu
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