VNC is not an X-Server

One response I got to my appeal for better Windows support is to use VNC.
I am quite familiar with VNC, MS NetMeeting, Sun Forum, etc. THESE THINGS
ARE NOT X-SERVERS!   BELIEVE ME!

With VNC you get occasional snapshots of the screen - perhaps every few seconds you
might get a screen update over Ethernet. NetMeeting is much worse in that it updates
only part of the window (every few seconds) so an animated display ends up looking
like a patchwork of all the input screens that went to form it. Yuck!

I define an X Server as a device that renders what it is told by the application to render.
VNC and its ilk do not do anything of the sort. I happen to like VNC - it is much better
than NetMeeting, but it is not much good for more than slightly animated displays.

Even if there is no movie-like animation, but there is rubber-band functionality where
something is happening in the display while you drag the mouse, the result is a
very unsatisfactory user experience.  Probably, what you need to do in such cases
is to move as much of the graphics manipulation as possible to the client (user's machine).
This is exactly what is done with some of the Java mapping toolkits like ObjectFX.

A difficult problem for general graphical displays, but an important one, and one that
is crying out for an adequate solution.  Maybe some future version of X could be that
solution, but it is not there yet - fix the small packets, excessive client-server interaction,
and other things I complained about in my previous missive, then X starts to look
more feasible.

If all you have are more-or-less static displays, like forms, then VNC et al work fine.
However, in such cases it is not too hard to rewrite entirely using traditional web technologies
(HTML/ECMAScript/etc.). So... for the problem for which HTML does not work then
VNC, NetMeeting, Forum, etc., also do not work.

Lots of folks have recognized the problem - which is why we have things like SVG, Flash, etc.
Unfortunately, SVG has limited performance and Flash has limited functionality. What we need
is a technology that is very fast, can do anything graphical, makes efficient use of bandwidth
and hardware acceleration, works great as a fat client or thin client, is easy to use, universally
accepted, etc.

For now - there is great need for better XFree86 performance on Windows platforms and
enhancements to X protocol and X functionality to make X more compatible with the
web environment.  Fix these things and get X integrated into the browsers and you
would see the X market explode.

Jim Schatzman