Re: [gtk-list] Re: Displaying JPEGs

[Drazen Kacar <dave srce hr>]

Owen Taylor wrote:
> 
> Drazen Kacar <dave@srce.hr> writes:
> 
> > Could someone tell me why GDK (or ImLib, for that matter) doesn't support
> > XIE?
> 
> (For the unitiated, XIE is the X Image Extension)
> 
>  - XIE is complicated and difficult to use. (Raster tried to 
>    use it originally for Imlib, and gave up in frustration.)

This is a reasonable explanation. I gave up in frustration when I saw the
size of documentation. Do you know of any web page or mail archives or
anything with a more detailed explanation? All I've heard about XIE
was person A saying that "person B some time ago discussed it with
Rasterman and they both concluded XIE was unusable", but person B is
currently unreachable, so I'll have to find another X guru.

>  - XIE is not widely supported.  (Nobody uses it, so expect
>    bugs even where it is present.)

Nobody uses it like "nobody uses PEX" or nobody uses it like "nobody
uses DPS"? Solaris X server has the extension. D/UX has it also. Even
X server on Ultrix, which we use here for some X terminals, has it. And
Digital stopped supporting Ultrix years ago. So I'll take this as "XFree
doesn't have it."

As for bugs, Motif is widely used, but you have to expect bugs in it.
Windows are widely used also. ;-)

>  - XIE only would give significant benefits if servers accelerated
>    its functions with hardware. I know of no servers that
>    do that.

Yes and no. UltraSPARCs, for example, have instructions which correspond
to Pentium's MMX set. I suppose Sun's X server uses them and ImLib doesn't.
In this case my image would probably be displayed 3-4 times faster through
XIE than with ImLib, even if my video card knows nothing about JPEG.

-- 
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