[cairo] Mozilla Developer day notes

[Evan Martin]

Hello,

I just went to the Mozilla Developer day[1] and was pleasantly
surprised[2] to see Cairo mentioned all over the place:
 - they demoed a JavaScript-accessible Canvas widget that mirrored the
   Cairo API;
 - they can use Cairo (or libart) as an SVG backend (I think?);
 - they want to get away from the "CSS pixel = display pixel" because it
   breaks down for high-res displays, which means they'll even want to
   be able to scale images up on high-resolution (200dpi was mentioned)
   displays;  "Cairo would give us this basically for free", and it'd
   also do screen magnification (important for accessibility).
There is one bad bullet point, too:
 - They're not sure how to handle drawing fonts in a Cairo world,
   because of speed concerns.  (Mozilla rendering is already slower than
   it needs to be because [I think] it's sending a glyph at a time to
   the underlying graphics layer...)
   (I know y'all are working on this and that it's difficult, but I
   thought I'd throw it out there.)

There was also the general discussion of how Mozilla wants to become
more of a community player in terms of using external code and that the
Cairo project fits in really well both in functionality and personality.
Glitz was mentioned multiple times, too; hardware acceleration makes
Cairo really compelling, so congrats to David on that.

However, I prodded Mike Shaver a bit more afterwards about it and he
said their biggest problem with Cairo is the license.  I'm hopefully not
misquoting him, but he said if it weren't for the license they'd be
using it "within two weeks".

I got the impression Cairo would have to do some dual-licensing MPL hack
to make it work, which to me sounds (changing the Cairo license to
support one app sounds) kinda gross.  But this may be totally wrong, so
please correct me.

(I don't have much of an opinion on the license discussion.)

[1] http://www.mozilla.org/events/dev-day-2004/
[2] I don't especially follow Mozilla development, so I mostly dropped by
to see what was going on in that world.