No Subject

Well, that is well met because this not a direct reply to your  
proposal.  Rather I'd to express the opinion that Xpm seems to be a  
very unsuited format for general distribution.  While it does look  
clever and cute it seems to be very far from being compact.  That may  
be a forgiveable failing, but it also looks like a pretty heavy format  
to interpret properly in all cases.  Clients would have to write tons  
of code to handle it well.  And before someone suggests libXpm, using  
it would foreclose the opportunity to run clients on anything but X  
systems which I thought was one of the main reasons for the switch to  
client/server. 


Personally, I'd think that the ideal format for images would be EPS  
because it is so flexible and device independent.  The ability to scale  
and rotate the image arbitarily would make for a beautiful client.   
However there are just too many systems without postscript and for  
which it would be to demand to much that PS is installed (the free  
availability of ghostscript notwithstanding), so that I won't even  
suggest it.

Let's go with something simple and easy to interpret (and compact, if  
possible).  The format I suggested would probably fit the bill, but if  
someone comes up with something better, I'd be happy to take that  
instead.

	Carl Edman