[MUD-Dev] Re: Graphic design, client questions

[Jay Carlson]

[sorry, lost the second level of attribution]

On Thu, 17 Dec 1998 09:38:14 -0800
Caliban Tiresias Darklock<caliban at darklock.com> wrote:

>> The client can force the user to only enter valid commands.
>
> MUD and client versions would have to match... exactly. BAD idea.

Strictly speaking the mud and client versions do not have to match, but both
sides do have to agree on a common protocol to express the range of valid
commands.

I initially wrote "both sides have to speak the same protocol" but that's
misleading.  Consider a server that knows how to speak many protocols, and
many different kinds of clients that know how to speak one or more of those
protocol sets. I don't mean to be tiresome, but that's something that was
expected in the MCP spec.

So what you need is at least one protocol spec that can be used to describe
this kind of stuff.  That's hard.  What often happens is that there's an
informal specification-by-implementation that's revved concurrently on
client and server, and voila, that's the "mud and client versions match
exactly" situation.

Jay