[MUD-Dev] Clients based on Netscape 5?

[Vadim Tkachenko]

Chris Gray wrote:

> [Caliban:]
>
> :I disagree. An HTTP connection is, at its heart, a telnet connection -- a teln
> :connection which abides by certain communication standards, much as any BBS
> :transaction was at its heart a simple modem connect over which the systems
> :communicated. Front-end mailers, netmail, FIDO technology, all of these were
> :simply limited command sets on which the industry standardised; HTTP is no
> :different. If Netscape is properly designed, then the HTTP connection object's
> :parent would be a raw telnet connect without option negotiation, which is easi
> :extended and turned into a proper telnet client through a simple implementatio
> :of DO/DON'T/WILL/WON'T handling.
>
> Well, I've seen the telnet docs (so I could implement some of it in my
> text agents), but I haven't seen any HTTP specs.

RFC (Request For Comments) numbers for HTTP protocol are, if I'm not mistaken:

RFC-2068 - HTTP/1.1
RFC-1945 - HTTP/1.0

I have them handy and can send or give the URL to find (along with 3 other
HTTP-regarding RFCs)

> My *impression* had been
> that there was little in common, other than that they both basically send
> text back and forth.

Both are a bit more complicated than that - telnet is a connection-oriented, HTTP
is transaction-oriented, as for starters.BTW, can someone enlighten me on how the
latest streaming protocols coexist with HTTP? Or they have nothing to do with it?

> You could make a MUD server (whether MUSH-like or otherwise) that sends out
> HTML (possibly extended) documents for things like room discriptions, etc.

That's a great idea if you want to make the multiprotocol support for the client -
for example, I was considering an advanced Java client being fed generally the same
information as usual telnet client, but just with descriptions like escape
sequences referencing to the URLs (if static) or containing some MD5 of sorts to
pass to the servlet (if dynamic) and showing them in a different frame.

> --
> Chris Gray   cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA

  --vt