Re: [dwm] [OT] Personal Website and CSS

On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 11:56:43AM -0700, Jack Woehr wrote:
> Matthias-Christian Ott wrote:
>> I would really like to throw away X11. So that you have a universal
>> hardware-implementable rendering language and system (buffer management
>> etc.) and an event layer on top of it. So if you want to browse a
>> hyperlinked document you compile it to the rendering language and run
>> an event manager, which handles things like scrolling, on top of it. So
>> you have a data pipe (model), renderer/compiler (view) and event manager
>> (controller).
>>
> If you are willing to accept Javascript as your universal rendering
> language
> and the web browser as its implementation, GWT though it needs much more
> engineering over the next year or two is actually pretty good.

As mentioned in another E-Mail I want to have a graphics processor
(which can be also software implemented) which is a register machine
with a stack for contexts. Programms for it would look like this:

  mv x,y ; move to (x;y)
  st %c,#111111 ; set color to #111111
  pt x,y ; set point at (x;y)
  pt x,y
  rd ; render
  st %b, 2 ; load buffer 0

So you have multiple drawable buffers that you can stack and map. It's
much like cairo or PostScript, but fully network transparent.

On top of this runs a programme that manages the screen (does input
redirection, talks to applications which want to run on screen) and a
window manager which arranges the windows.

Applications run now on any computer (since it's network transparent
via something like 9p) and communicate with the graphics processor and
the screen manager.

It's basically combining Plan 9 with X11. Except that X11 is not a big
monolithic system anymore.

So you can compile your nroff document to assembly language for the
graphics processor and simply display it. It's basically a simple version
of PostScript without scripting capabilities.

In MVC terms you could consider the application, which is itself
subdivided, to be the model, the screen manager to be the controller
and the graphics processor the view, if this helps understanding.

I don't know how well this would work, but when trying to design a
nroff replacement I thought about the graphics processor as a simple
replacement for PostScript and PDF and later added this idea about the
screen manager.

What I really like about it is that rendered documents (which used to
be PostScript or PDF) are now the same as ordinary applications except
that applications handle input and may modify their window contents.

Additionally this enables you simply pipe data into a compiler and render
it to a screen or a bitmap.

Regards,
Matthias-Christian
Received on Thu Feb 19 2009 - 19:44:41 UTC