What's wrong with delegating all of these features into modular applications maintained separately, where they belong? We already tried the monolithic "everyth

What's wrong with delegating all of these features into modular applications maintained separately, where they belong? We already tried the monolithic "everything you might want to make a GUI plus a few kitchen sinks transported over a network" approach to display servers. It didn't work out very well - it created a gigantic, bloated mess, with forward-looking extensions bolted on (composite) and deprecated ideas from the early 1990s clinging on for dear life (everything related to fonts). There's no reason a networked layer can't be implemented on top of Wayland. Plus, because Wayland is simply a "dumb pipe"-style compositor, several network abstractions can be implemented and duke it out for supremacy: with Wayland, one could write a server which ships GL commands to the client (enabling leveraging the fast render path of the client's video hardware), a server which ships rasterized video (a la VNC), or even a server which implements drawing primitives a la X (or X itself)! Wayland does not preclude the idea of network transparency. It simply builds the base level of abstraction on which network transparency can be built.