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X-Server with Alpha Transparency
An anonymous reader pointed us to a Java X Server that has hacked together
alpha channel transparency. Its not XF86, but its nifty. It demos (worthless but pretty) transparent windows, bizarre but pretty transparent widgets, but also the extremely wonderful and essential anti-aliased fonts that X11 continues to lack.
IMO , that kind of "feature" is useless to get some work done. It should be implemanted on the application level - ie only a few apps need ta have alpha channel things like the Gimp or some games. The only people really interested are Hardware vendors, one more occasion to upgrade the CPU and/or the Graphic card .....
Actually, many GUI applications could potentially make use of this. Think anti-aliased text, or PNG's that actually work correctly in web-browsers. You say that applications that need it should be the ones to implement it. Well what about other features of the windowing system, like line drawing? By having this in the windowing system, there's one piece of code to debug, optimize, and make hardware specific versions of. If each application has to support alpha-transparency on its own, then we'll never get to make use of hardware-based alpha-composition. Do you really want to see the day when GIMP runs better on Win32 than on Linux?
And your performance claims make no sense. Just adding alpha transparency to the windowing system doesn't mean every widget would have to use it. Widgets that don't need it wouldn't use it, or would have it as an option. There wouldn't be any significant performance degradation for widgets that don't use it. Widgets that do need it can make use of it, and less developers will need to reinvent the wheel by writing their own alpha-composition code.