					17 December, 1986

The enclosed document, 'proposal.out', and it's PostScript version,
'proposal.PS', is a working draft of a specification for a user interface
toolkit that is proposed to be built on top of X version 11.

This document has resulted from an intensive effort on the part of Digital
Equipment Corporation and Hewlett-Packard Company to merge the better
features of the toolkits in the distribution directories ../Xr,
../DECToolkit and ../Sx and extract a common foundation upon which a
variety of application environments may be built.  Their stated goal is to
provide the next higher level of common (portable) interfaces above Xlib.

M.I.T. has a goal to have available at least a preliminary version of
a user interface toolkit and one or more application environments (UIMS)
to be distributed with the first general distribution of X version 11.

The document "X Toolkit, A Proposed Architecture" is distributed for your
comment and to let you know one of the directions in which we are headed.
If we are to achieve the availability date as stated, the period during
which comments can be expected to have major impact on the implementation
is unfortunately very short.  We do, however, invite those comments.

The list of individual contributors to this draft is already very long;
a future revision of a specification will give them the recognition
they deserve.

I hope that applications developers who need to use one of the
applications environments distributed with X version 10 release 4 will be
able to use this draft proposal to prioritize and partition their
development effort.



					Ralph R. Swick
					M.I.T. Project Athena
					Swick@Athena.MIT.EDU
