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Comment by digitalsankhara | Hacker News Reader

Seems logical to me when the technology of the era is taken into account. Having the application code running on the most powerful machine i.e the server and then sending the graphics commands to be rendered on your specialist graphics workstation would make sense. I don't know enough about the actual efficiency of the X Window protocol though.

But don't we model this type of protocol today with the web?

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Well, the web can shift rendering between server and client side depending on the developers’ needs, but graphics is done mostly on the client side with their hardware. And while things tend to cycle between “centralized” then “edge computing” and back, graphics does make more sense to stuck to the client device, especially with ever bigger screen resolutions/color spaces/refresh rates paired with low-latency requirements.

Yes, of course, high performance graphics is better closer to the display hardware.

But I've felt that the terminology of server side rendering w.r.t. the web seems to imply something else in my mind. I agree with your comment but, to me, nothing actually gets rendered on the server - the code TO render in the client gets constructed on the server, e.g. a web page, partial page etc and sent to the client to be interpreted for display in a graphical environment (the browser).

Splitting hairs, technically a bitmap graphic could be said to be rendered remotely and it's display is simply a transfer function - sorry, I realise I'm been overly pedantic.

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