Re: Gnome's Character Map

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From: peter (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Re: Gnome's Character Map
Date: 20:45 on 14 Dec 2006
I really think the X Consortium screwed up by dumping the old-style X11
COMPOSE character support with X11R6 and putting all the responsibility
in the application's lap. I used to be able to reliably enter accented
Latin-1 characters, at least, *regardless* of the application I was using.

Yes, I know it was a kludge, but the fix should have involved making the
server responsible for the keyboard (which is, after all, part of the server),
and providing a way for a *separate* application to provide an input method,
if necessary, and a simple hook to talk to that application from a client
that finds itself talking to an older server.

The development of X11 should have been away from the '80s era "we
can't put any policy in the server because we don't know what we're
doing" to "we can afford to make the server smarter and take basic
user interface off the application's back". It worked for window managers,
it'd work for menus and other basic user-interface components as well.

But, no, the damn thing gets more horrid and hateful with every passing
year.

Hey, now I'm not working for $VBC any more I won't get called on the carpet
when I write "X11 is fundamentally broken and can't be fixed". There, I've
said it. I've been holding that in for eight years now, and boy is it good
to get that out.

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