"Claus Reinke"
though software fallbacks for missing hardware support would seem essential
You mean having widget renderers that don't use any of those frills, don't you? Don't underestimate the breath of the target audience that wants to run things on their sandwich maker... or have processing oomph left to do real work. I don't know how fast eg. mesa renders basic GL in software (at least in comparison to my geForce, it's a slug), but I'd expect it to be a viable choice to render 2d to a dumb framebuffer. GL has also the advantage of being network-transparent[1] and very bandwidth-efficient, at least if you make proper use of display lists and don't use too many different textures. Presenting impressive demos in the spirit of [2] can't have any negative effects (despite users wondering why it doesn't work until they discover that their distribution starts X with --nolisten-tcp) [1]Really. See GLX. [2]http://www.md.chalmers.se/Cs/Research/Functional/Fudgets/demoform.html -- (c) this sig last receiving data processing entity. Inspect headers for copyright history. All rights reserved. Copying, hiring, renting, performance and/or quoting of this signature prohibited.