Interclient Communications Conventions (ICCC)

The Interclient Communications Conventions (ICCC) defines the mechanism used to pass text between clients. Because the system is capable of supporting multiple code sets, it may be possible that two applications that are communicating with each other are using different code sets. ICCC defines how these two clients agree on how the data is passed between them. If two clients have incompatible character sets (for example, Latin1 and Japanese (JIS)), some data may be lost when characters are transported.

However, if two clients have different code sets but compatible character sets, ICCC enables these clients to pass information with no data lost. If code sets of the two clients are not identical, CompoundText encoding is used as the interchange with the COMPOUND_TEXT atom used. If data being communicated involves only portable characters (7-bit, ASCII, and others) or the ISO8859-1 code set, the data is communicated as is with no conversion by way of the XA_STRING atom.

Titles and icon names need to be communicated to the Window Manager using the COMPOUND_TEXT atom if nonportable characters are used; otherwise, the XA_STRING atom can be used.

Motif, for example, uses its own atoms to transfer textual data:

For more information, refer to Motif Widget Writer's Guide.

Any other encoding is limited to the ability to convert to the locale of the Window Manager. The Window Manager runs in a single locale and supports only titles and icon names that are convertible to the code set of the locale under which it is running.

The Motif library and all desktop clients should follow these conventions.