Z Consortium
From Wednus
Contents |
Primary Goal
The primary goal of the Z consortium is to produce Z Window System, or just Z, and to make it the best freely-redistributable Open Source implementation of the browser-based windowing by implementing it on as many browser platforms as possible, by enhancing and extending it to meet the needs of new browser platforms and by licensing it in a manner that is the same as or equivalent in spirit to the original MIT/X licence. Z seeks to work towards this goal in a manner that gives the strongest weight to the technical integrity of the ideas, implementation, and individuals involved, with the commercial viability and influences from commercial or political interests being non-goals and explicitly not addressed.
Operation
Volunteer individuals who support the Z's primary goals determine the Z's operation, and the technical direction is determined by those contributors whose concrete ideas and proposals are backed up with implementations or the resources to implement them, also in consideration of the Z's primary goals. The Z consortium encourages every member to do their work and make their contributions to the development of Z in the manner that they find most comfortable and productive, and using our public mailing lists ensures seamless integration and full participation of the Z development community.
Description
Z provides windowing for web browsers. With encapsulating the complexity of cross-browser support, it provides the standard toolkit and protocol to build graphical user interfaces (GUI) on WWW navigators such as Internet Explorer, Gekco based browsers(Firefox), KHTML based browsers including Konqueror and Safari, Opera and IceBrowser(Rhino based); It supports almost all web browsers with modern DOM implementation. Z provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the screen and interacting with a mouse and keyboard. Z does not mandate the user interface — individual client programs handle this. As such, the visual styling of Z-based environments varies greatly; different programs may present radically different interfaces.
Design principles
Z inherites the early priciples of X which set by Bob Scheifler and Jim Gettys in 1987:
- Do not add new functionality unless you know of some real application that will require it.
- It is as important to decide what a system is not as to decide what it is. Do not serve all the world's needs; rather, make the system extensible so that additional needs can be met in an upwardly compatible fashion.
- The only thing worse than generalizing from one example is generalizing from no examples at all.
- If a problem is not completely understood, it is probably best to provide no solution at all.
- If you can get 90 percent of the desired effect for 10 percent of the work, use the simpler solution.
- Isolate complexity as much as possible.
- Provide mechanism rather than policy. In particular, place user interface policy in the clients' hands.
User Interfaces
Z deliberately contains no specification as to application user interface, such as buttons, menus, window title bars and so on. Instead, user software - such as window managers, GUI widget toolkits and desktop environments, or application-specific GUIs, such as point of sale - provide/define all such details. As the result, the "typical" Z interface may vary tremendously.
(draft version 0.0.1: followed X description format in wikipedia.org)
