[MUD-Dev] Re: Telnet Echo OFF/ON commands and other thingies..

[James Wilson]

On Fri, 02 Oct 1998, Bruce Mitchener, Jr. wrote:

>My opinion on this differs somewhat in that I'd rather see a server that
>sent out all data encoded in some manner, and when people needed
>telnet-style access, they'd connect to an auxillary server which rendered
>the content from the encoded format into the traditional flat text format
>and handled the basics of command parsing.  This server would handle the
>telnet option negotiation.

I have also been thinking about something like this, but worry about
sending information that would be wasted. to take an extreme 
example, suppose one supported both a fully graphical
client and standard telnet clients. when someone telnets in (possibly 
via the auxiliary you suggest), do they get the same data feed that the
graphical clients would? it seems like there needs to be some 
protocol for clients to tell the server, "I want graphics", "I want color",
etc, so the server can gear the data to the client. This way,
you can be sure that the server only sends out data the client
can actually use. (cf. ansi color in text muds)

Once you make the server capable of serving multiple sorts of data 
streams, you might as well make it capable of accepting different sorts 
of client requests as well - so maybe a client could specify "I will send
commands in traditional telnet-mud style" or "I will send commands 
apropos to a graphical client" and so on. 

James