> In short, would you still hate X11 if someone went and streamlined both > protocol and implementation? If so, why?
Maybe not, but that's changing both what it is, and what it does. It would be a fundamentally different program; how is anyone supposed to speculate on that? > If the argument is against complexity: I cannot imagine rio being > simpler that X11. rio contains driver code for access to the display and > the inputs, window management code and a terminal emulator. Isn't that sad for X11? rio should, by all means, be much more complex than X. But it isn't. It's really just a file multiplexer, with a little bit of command rewriting. It's also not really a terminal emulator, so much as it is a text window. That being said, it has its warts. That text window for example is copy-pasted, then heavily modified across rio, sam, and acme. For all plan9's focus on cleanliness, I've always found that very disappointing.
