X Zoom Extension: Ideas and Suggestions!

[Gian Filippo Pinzari]

Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> That was our initial thought several years ago when we first started
> working with the GNOME Accessibility project on screen magnification,
> but we ended up dropping the idea, because they wanted far more control
> over the magnified output than a simple server side magnifier could
> provide.   For some cases, it's probably good enough, and clearly more
> could be made more efficient, but those weren't the cases we had to
> tackle.

I understand your points and fully agree. Anyway they seem to me two
different problems. The point of extensions like RANDR, I think, is
to make advanced features easily accessible to all clients (built-in?),
even if these features could be implemented in clients. If we accept
the idea that to implement magnification we have to grab the pixels
from the frame-buffer and put it again, magnified, on the server, we
are loosing most of the advantages of having a high-level protocol
to draw on the display. My take of X windowing, instead, is that we
should just go on the "View" menu of the X server and select "Increase
font size", as we do with Firefox ;-).

I'm perfectly aware that there are important performance implications
(an X server is very low in the stack) and that handling something
like a "X11 CSS" is not like handling HTML, but maybe it's a possibi-
lity. Extensions like DAMAGE appear to me like a renounce. It's like
saying: "we can't implement all the things that could be useful in the
X server, so let's make applications deal directly with the pixels
on the frame-buffer"...

/Gian Filippo.

P.S.: I love the DAMAGE extension and understand the whole lot of
possibilities it opens to developers ;-).