Watching a video will be the same as a on Wayland, just sending a video buffer, no?
The icons: you allocate memory on server for that and do not transfare the icon everytime. I think x11 works like that, not sure.
I know GUI lib that you can still compile with freetype disabled. Not everyone need the GUIs you talking about. Everyone is using cars, so lets ban bikes.. it does not need to be like that.
I find X11 RPC useful, simple UI is ok.. you can write programs that will run on any slow or not computer, remotely. Web is not that simple, it is different way of programming, it is not transparent. Web is useful for commerce, but not for controlling machines at factories or pilot cabins. IMO.
I don't really get your first 2 paragraphs. We are talking about connecting remotely to another computer, you can't do much at the other end of a network call with a server allocated buffer - at most you can cache stuff there. But that ain't helping with a video or any kind of fancier than a solid rectangle graphics.
And sure, simple UIs have their place - but they will also work just as well with a proper transport protocol, hell, they would compress even better. So just waypipe that simple UI as you see it fit.
You can cache icons on the server, you do not need to send them over a network, that is it. With video, I'm saying it is a case where wayland is not better, it is just the same.
So you say compression of said icons, etc, is better than caching them on the server? No.. You've mentioned web, but no one does that on the web.
I mean, no one does what you suggest on the web. You do not render a web page to an image and send that to a browser.
To summarize. No one wants X11 transparency to run a web browser. But ok, if someone wants to do that.. X11 still can be more advantegeous over waypipe.
Because on the web we have a very very complex protocol(s) built up over decades to tell a client what to draw locally. That's html/css/js and its scope is far larger than of x draw commands (it's also an application model).
But again, GUI apps don't use X draw commands for the most part, so they are effectively a bitmap/video stream to X's eyes. And what's better to transport a video stream than a format designed for efficient transport of video streams.
Idk given there is no concept of cache. But also I'm looking at GTK menu, it is a simple menu, white bg. May be it can be rendered using draw calls. May be the complex UIs is just fashion and will be gone in a few years. The GUIlib could detect if program is running on a remote computer and reduce the effects, but they will need a concept of network for that.
Also the font rendering. The client could then just send text to the x11 server if it was not vector fonts.
x11 xrdb. With it you can configure say font size on your computer, not on the computer where program is running. Say comp1: 10pt, comp2: 20pt.
The icons: you allocate memory on server for that and do not transfare the icon everytime. I think x11 works like that, not sure.
I know GUI lib that you can still compile with freetype disabled. Not everyone need the GUIs you talking about. Everyone is using cars, so lets ban bikes.. it does not need to be like that.
I find X11 RPC useful, simple UI is ok.. you can write programs that will run on any slow or not computer, remotely. Web is not that simple, it is different way of programming, it is not transparent. Web is useful for commerce, but not for controlling machines at factories or pilot cabins. IMO.