Xr Renamed to Cairo

Charles Goodwin writes "Xr, the vector graphics extension for XFree86 that Keith Packard, Carl Worth, and a few others have been hard at work on, has been renamed and is now officially called Cairo. Keith and Carl recently gave a detailed presentation on Cairo (then known as Xr) which should be a useful read for those wishing to understand it a little better. There is already a useful Gtk+ rendering backend that uses Cairo, as well as an SVG test suite. This, along with Gnome2's subtle adoption of SVG and the inception of Xouvert (which now has goals for both the short term and long term, and an initial plan which includes coexisting with XFree86), spells a bright future for the eye candy of an X desktop."

Comments

Re:Well now, that's just great.

[Rooktoven]

In some ways almost transparent is easier on the eyes. I know when I have 4 or 5 mac terminals open the overlay can be confusing-- not to mention if (assuming a dark background) a light colored application ends up behind a terminal.

I know it's nice for the "see what is possible" factor, but pseudo-transparency has it's place. I might even opt for it at times if I had the choice.

Finally, buffering.

[TheRaven64]

From the short term goals:

Provide an option to force backingstore on all windows.

This is the one I've been waiting for for a while. When RAM was $500 for 64K it made sense not to buffer windows, but now it is insane not to, forcing redraws which drain CPU and networt bandwidth (on remote displays).

Re:Well now, that's just great.

[Jon Abbott]

I can't remember where I read this quote, but it went something like, "In the publishing industry, tons are spent and much effort is made to ensure that the paper is thick enough so that the reader can't see the words underneath the current page... In the computer industry, it seems that the effort spent is for the opposite effect." :^)

Re:Who names these things?

[nathanh]

In all seriousness, I think that poor name choices hurt the adoption of free software. Think about "Photoshop" vs. "The GIMP," or "Internet Explorer" vs. "Mozilla." Rather than something simple, descriptive, and catchy, we usually opt for indecipherable codenames, stupid recursive acronyms, or lame in-jokes that few people but the developers themselves will get.

Oh? So Excel just says "spreadsheet" to you? How about Quark Express? Or Oracle? Or Solaris? These names are only "obvious" because you have heard them before. There is nothing descriptive about them.