xmosaic experience

Bill Janssen <janssen@parc.xerox.com>

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Message-id: <EfXGE90B0KGWQv0bZM@holmes.parc.xerox.com>
Date: 	Thu, 25 Feb 1993 11:54:49 PST
Sender: Bill Janssen <janssen@parc.xerox.com>
From: Bill Janssen <janssen@parc.xerox.com>
To: WWW-TALK@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: xmosaic experience

I had an unsettling experience last night.  I wanted to look at the
latest draft of an Internet RFC, and thought to myself, ``Why not use
this nifty xmosaic tool to fetch it?'', since I had recently discovered
xmosaic.  So I typed in a URL, and it core-dumped on me.  Well, it's
only version 0.8, and probably doesn't know everything yet, so I tried
going through a gopher gateway (still using xmosaic) and accessing it
that way.  Well, I got through to the RFC -- and suddenly my X server
started chewing up CPU.  After chugging for several minutes (X11R5 on a
Sparc-2 with 48MB of RAM), xmosaic puts up the text of the RFC, marked
``page 1 of 5''.  Huh?  Surely this document has about 50 pages?

Turns out xmosaic has this (to me, fatally flawed) design decision I
hadn't suspected.  Instead of using a text widget (I'm not familiar with
the capabilities of the Motif text widget, but perhaps it does not
handle multi-font, multi-color text), xmosaic seems to *paint* text
strings on a window, and then pan the window around when the user
scrolls, rather than re-drawing the text.

Fascinating.

Bill