README

udesk: The Unix Desktop Environment API
=======================================

udesk is a simple OpenGL inspired specification to
interact with a desktop environment in an implementation
agnostic way.

Currently many GUI toolkits are available for Unix-like systems,
they all provide similar features, but it is impossible to
develop in a simple and toolkit or desktop environment
independent way, without resorting to additional libraries,
dependencies or wrappers. There is no simple way to be desktop
environment independent, while taking advantage of modern
features that desktop environments have to offer.

This specification tries to create a desktop and toolkit agnostic
API that could easily be implemented by different toolkits to
provide a common desktop independent standard.
The API has the following objectives:
* Use the C language for the specification, any
  other language can be supported via language bindings.
* Keeping an approach closely similar to OpenGL, so that
  developers can feel familiar with the API.
* Be minimal, the specification must not require external
  dependencies other than standard C, although the implementation
  itself may depend on whatever library or software is felt necessary.
* The required features must not be redundant or unnecessary, the
  core specification must be clean and easy to implement.
* The implementation must be able to provide additional features,
  to expose extended functionality to the developer, whenever it is
  supposed to be useful, such features could become core standard in
  the future.
* The specification should be able to evolve without breaking
  backward compatibility in the future, the applications
  must not need to recompile on newer specification release or
  on newer implementation release.
* The specification doesn't require a toolkit to be the implementation,
  small desktop environments or even window managers should be
  able to implement it.
* The specification shouldn't aim to replace toolkits, a desktop environment
  is free to provide the implementation and keep using the preferred
  toolkit for desktop environment specific applications.

See LICENSE for license details.