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## 37 Images

Although images are not typically a part of the GUI, they are often part of an application. For this reason and others, image support is part of Forms Library. It is not unusual that the users of a graphical user interface want some graphics support.

The most important reason to have image support in the library is the amount of questions/requests on the mailing list of the Forms Library about images. It convinced us that having image support will make many Forms Library users life easier.

The second reason has something to do with image support in X, which at best is cumbersome to use as the API reflects the underlying hardware, which, at the level of Xlib, is quite appropriate, but not quite what an application programmer wants to deal with. Image support in Forms Library for the large part is hardware independent. This is possible because xforms makes distinction between the real image it keeps and the image being displayed. At the expense of some flexibility and memory requirement, the high-level image support API should prove to be useful for most situations.

The third reason is that image support as it is now in the library is well isolated and is only linked into an application when it is actually being used. This is not a trivial point in the consideration to include image support in the library proper.

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