🚀 go-pugleaf

> Personally, I don't see a simple unifying concept in NeWS either.

What about PostScript?

> I am also not convinced of your rule of system design.  Complex tasks
> are most often successfully tamed using a layered approach.

Certainly.

> I like
> to think of networking protocols as a good example.  TCP/IP is built
> on a number of protocol layers each providing a higher level of
> abstraction.  Building TCP/IP from scratch is quite difficult and
> error prone.

But using it isn't. I guess I need to make this point clearer. Design
the system to make simple things simple *for the users* of the system.
In the case of a window system, there are two sets of users: the
people who sit in front of he screen, and the people who program the
applications.

> This way, if
> someone wants functionality that is not present at higher levels,
> they can use lower levels to implement it.

That's the second half... making the hard things possible. But you
should start by making the easy things easy first. The way X is set
up it's like (to get back to your TCP/IP example) putting all of NFS
into every program on the system. You can certainly get the overhead
down with shared libraries and such, but I hardly think you would
claim that was a better design.
-- 
 _--_|\  Peter da Silva. +1 713 274 5180. <peter@ficc.uu.net>.
/      \ Also <peter@ficc.lonestar.org> or <peter@sugar.lonestar.org>
\_.--._/
      v  "Have you hugged your wolf today?" `-_-'