From: oj@world.std.com (Oliver Jones)
Subject: Re: X Design choice for color handling: question
Keywords: color
Organization: Shawsheen Software
Lines: 20

In article <lu1oftINNnfk@cascais.cs.utexas.edu> sirosh@cs.utexas.edu (Joseph Sirosh) writes:
>
>...Why did X designers decide to not associate
>the color with the object being drawn, and instead associate it with the
>display it is being drawn on?

In X10, the drawing attributes were bundled into drawing
requests;  that is, the server's drawing model was stateless.

This caused problems with performance and network traffic,
so the X11 redesign included the graphic context to codify
the drawing state.  Most application designers who want to
draw things in several different colors create a GC for
each color during initialization, then pass the GC id in
each drawing request.

For more information see Scheifler and Gettys's article
in the 1986 ACM Transactions on Graphics.


