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Re: CF: win32 client and XPM
Scott MacFiggen (smurf@csua.berkeley.edu) wrote:
> >Coding a Windows specific XPM lib is absolutely necessary. While the
> >version of libXpm code (now about 1 year old) had Win32 compiler
>
> I think no one would actually do the work needed for that.
> I checked into PNG a bit and it seems perfect.
> It compresses the images, it has support for
> transperancy and alpha channels, the images are stores
> in MSB byte order and libs exists for both win32
> and UNIX. I used ImageMagic to convert some of the images
> and they looked fine to me...
>
> I think it would be less work to add PNG support
> to the server then to port XPM to win32...
Excuse my ignorance... are we talking about the same XPM? I don't seem
to see the need for an "XPM lib" --- XPM is probably the most simple
portable image format I have seen so far. When porting nethack to
AmigaOS (which doesn't have an "XPM lib") I wrote a converter from XPM
to IFF-ILBM in no time, without ever seeing a bit of XPM
documentation.
Adding PNG to the server is most obviously a lot more complicated than
parsing XPM on the client side, esp. since you can always choose to
cache (if caching is added to the protocol) the images in whatever
format you like (for example, a direct bitmap dump, if that's what
Windows likes).
I think one should use a _simple_, easy to read image format on the
server, to easy client implementation. Just because platform foo
supports "PNG" as a native format doesn't mean we should use PNG ---
after all, platform bar probably supports YYT as it's native format,
so why not add YYT as well? PNG is a lot more difficult to read, so
using PNG instead of XPM means that the client implementation for _one_
platform is slightly simplified (since no image conversion is needed),
while adding a lot more work for all the other client programmers.
Remember, Windooze is not the only platform. Make it simple for
everybody, not just for Windows-Programmers.
Christian
--
Christian (Icho/Gandhi/Ribald @sunbroy53.informatik.tu-muenchen.de, 13326)
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