abbott.pa@XEROX.COM.UUCP (09/17/87)
I was just reading through the x11 beta spec and was mystified by the rule that image data isn't byte swapped by the server. What's the rationale for this? The only one I can imagine is this: clients might do something clever about storage and/or composition of image data that would avoid the overhead of making the server byte swap all that data. The counterargument is that clients that use image data at all must, under the current rule, contain byte swapping code, know when to use it, etc. It seems to me that this rule amounts to forcing all clients (that use image data) to deal with an issue for the sake of some that might know how to deal with it well. It would seem much preferable to add a message (or flag in the open connection protocol) that lets a client announce that it would like to be responsible for byte swapping image data (and this could be part of the connection state, i.e., retracted by another message). But perhaps I'm missing something? By the way, I'm sending this message at the suggestion of Ramana Rao, who said he hadn't heard anything about this issue. - Curtis Abbott