> Lots of people have ideas for an "X12" that turns out to be stuff already supported by the X11 protocol.
That is true, although many of them are messy in X11. One of these is that the protocol and implementation are tied together more than they should be (one of these problems is server configuration requests, which I think do not belong there). Some of my ideas are:
- Timestamps. The way timestamps work in X11 is messy. A better way is 64-bit timestamps with an unspecified rate; what is specified is that timestamps are monotonic; i.e. if any two requests/responses/events use timestamps, the later one is guaranteed to have a larger number as its timestamp. (However, timestamps might not always increase when the server is grabbed; this is implementation-dependent.)
- Font path configuration. This should not be part of the core protocol; it improperly exposes the directory structure and the font formats. (I do suggest a XSET extension, which is optional, and what settings they set and how are implementation-dependent; the "xset" command would pass its arguments (except -display) to the server, which returns the text which will be the response. This makes it completely general, but a separate specification would provide guidelines for consistency, although not strictly required.)
- Screen saver configuration. I would have the core protocol has only two things dealing with screen savers: the screen saver event, and the suppress screen saver flag in window attributes. If the suppress screen saver flag is set on any mapped window, then the server should suppress the screen saver. Other than that, how the screen saver is implemented (if at all) and what it does is implementation-dependent, and probably configurable by the user.
- Mouse cursor shapes. My proposition allows the server to substitute its own full colour cursor of arbitrary size and opacity (and maybe even animation) when a client requests a font-based cursor shape (either the standard X cursor font, or some others, depending on what the implementation supports), unless the user disables this feature. Whether or not this is implemented is implementation-dependent, and it is completely independent of the protocol. (Whether or not you get the same image as you would by loading the cursor font with EnableAntialiasing and rendering that character, is also implementation-dependent.) (Substituting cursor shapes is probably not a feature I would use (I like the standard monochrome cursors), but some users will like it, especially those with very high resolution displays.)
- Bells. The core bell request should instead be like XkbBell() (although none of its variants (such as XkbDeviceBell and XkbForceBell etc) are possible). The only thing the server is guaranteed to do is to send a bell event if any clients care; what else it might or might not do is implementation-dependent and would probaly be configurable by the user to some extend. (For example, it may be configurable to suppress the audible bell if the bell event is requested by any client.)
- Allow different screens to have their own keyboard, or to share. Same is true of the mouse, and there may even be more than one mouse per screen (this is to support touch-screens; I don't like touch screens, but some people like it). Clients that don't care can ignore the field which specifies which mouse the event is.
- Use only one endianness rather than two in the protocol, for simplicity. The first byte is "X"; this also enables the possibility (but not the requirement) that a server implementation might support both X11 and X12 clients using the same socket, since you can distinguish between them.
- Some additional standard mouse cursor shapes (in addition to the ones in X11). The cursor font and "Fixed" font are the two "highly recommended" fonts to include in the system. (Some of my suggested new standard cursor shapes include: XC_arrow_plus, XC_arrow_minus, XC_magnify, XC_magnify_plus, XC_magnify_minus, XC_chaos, XC_invisible, XC_stop, XC_no_smoking, XC_xterm_lazy)
- The -retro option should be the default.