[MUD-Dev] Re: Modular MUD

[Adam J. Thornton]

On Mon, Aug 31, 1998 at 03:36:17PM -0500, Holly Sommer wrote:
> Uhh... my Markup Language knowledge base is rusty by a couple years, but 
> isn't XML a DTD of SGML, just like HTML is a DTD of SGML? Document Type 
> Definition - rules of what tags are allowed, the rules of use of those 
> tags, description of their behavior, etc.? I guess I'm just pedanting and 
> wondering if the question shouldn't rather be:
>    ...would I be better off developing a DTD other than XML?

Mmmm, XML may be a subset of SGML, and it may be a DTD, but like SGML and
unlike HTML it's a meta-markup language that lets you define your own
markup depending on the appropriate categories for your application.

> My answer would be: yes, if you have the time to invest in it.

Looks like SGML is too general and broad.  If I can do what I need in
XML--which I should be able to do--I can use much lighter weight parsers,
like expat.

I'm not convinced that XML isn't vast overkill and I'd be better off
developing my own protocol, for that matter.  Most of what I want to do is
tell clients what a room's data structures look like and get
verb-object-indirect object data back to the server.  I'm planning to use
something like NNTP to actually transmit description resources (text,
graphics, sounds, whatever the client and server can mutually negotiate),
so I don't need links and the like in my object data stream.

Adam
--
adam at princeton.edu 
"There's a border to somewhere waiting, and a tank full of time." - J. Steinman