Needs educating: Message from Linux (fwd)

[Charles Crawford]

         Thanks.  I understand what you are saying.  Does this mean that 
there would not be a fix for X-Windows like the MSAA in Windows?  Would we 
need some kind of major off-screen model?

-- charlie Crawford.

At 11:09 AM 1/22/02 -0700, you wrote:
>Actually, being familiar with X myself, I'll answer this one.
>
>Xwindows, is a misnomer, in reality, it's just an X server, and clients. The
>server draws to the screen, and sends user input to the clients. The clients
>are the applications, the clients are usually on the same machine as the
>server, but they don't have to be.
>
>X itself is nothing more than a network protocol for sending graphic data to
>an X workstation, the X protocol has no provisions for button, text box, or
>any widgets for that matter, it has: line, circle, filled circle, rectangle,
>filled rectangle, pixmap, etc...
>
>X also sends keyboard input and mouse click locations to the applications
>that own the windows they occur in.  Beyond that, X's only other capability
>is to send text glyphs (rendered in a given font) back to applications that
>request them.
>
>As for widgets, and controls, and a nice unified API for writing programs,
>you need a "toolkit library". What's a toolkit library you ask? A better
>question might be "what isn't a toolkit library?"
>First of all, there are a lot of toolkit libraries out there, some are very
>simple (Athena) while some have a full-blown callback API and can be adjusted
>with themes (GTK, GTK+) and some are object-oriented C++ based APIs (QT).
>They all basically do the same thing, provide functions/objects/structures to
>the application to draw typical GUI widgets, and send draw requests to the X
>server. Here's the hairy part, each toolkit has its own look and feel, has
>its own API, has its own conventions, and basically has its own everything.
>
>There's also the seperate window manager, which is simply another X client
>which registers a few special functions with the X server so it can get the
>location and owner of each window and add decorations and task switching
>behavior. Some (most) window managers do more than this, but they all do at
>least this.
>
>Windows, on the other had, has the equivalent of the toolkit library and
>window manager built into the kernel (sort of) and most applications either
>use that, or a custom one that is very similar to it.
>
>I'm sure this is incomplete, but I've already been wracking my brain for an
>hour over it, so I'll close here, feel free to ask questions or tell me about
>parts that are unclear.
> >       Good to see you on this list.  I wonder if there are some folks 
> out there
> > familiar with XWindows to share the kind of navigation that goes on with
> > it?  I have no idea.  Is it the same icons and rdio buttons and all of
> > tht?  How is it different than windows and how much more easy would access
> > be to develop in the XWindows environment?  These are important questions
> > to your point I imagine.
> >
>
>_______________________________________________
>Speakup mailing list
>Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
>http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup