Some perspective from the cheap seats...

Hmm, only saw it now, and noticed nothing similar in the responses,
but  NeWS, DPS (Display Postscript) and I recall the NEXT Cubes too
used Postscript for their rendering. This had the benefit of display
and printers having the same calls to output....

Hendrik

 On Mon, 24 Mar 2003 23:29:18 -0500 Havoc Pennington wrote:
It might be worth trying to think about how UI graphics (say, drawing
a button, or drawing a word processor document) are different from 
graphics in general.

Here are some things I can think of quickly:

 - WYSIWYG. We need the same API to draw to screen, printer, and a
   raster image to be dumped to a file, generating results that are
   basically the same. A pixel off here and there is OK in most cases,
   but using a different font or doubling line widths or something
   would not be. And we need client-side code available that can draw
   the primitives, even if there's also a server-side option.

 - Multiple apps. We need to use the API to draw basically every
   window on the server. So if there's a special visual or other
   limitations involved this may not work. Also, this means that 
   a simple double-buffer for a single window isn't enough; to 
   make things smooth, double-buffering spanning multiple windows 
   (or some other solution) seems to be needed.