[MUD-Dev] Public Domain Client

[Bruce]

Mik Clarke wrote:
>"Bruce Mitchener, Jr." wrote:
>> It was basically a format for tags that TkMOO would pick up and link in
>> the right way, and given that, when they clicked on, TkMOO would send
>> the command back to the server.  This allowed for clickable links in
>> HTML, and some other places.
>
>Hmmm. That's the sort of thing I'd like to support clients doing. Even
>better would be to define 'link types' and have menus of appropriate
>actions defined.  Is the syntax for the tags documented anywhere?


The main tag was simply this:

{link {command "command here"} {text "text here"}}

Which would be transformed into:

text here

Which when clicked upon, would run: 'command here'

There were ideas to expand it further and provide some better formatting
information to TkMOO (like tables, which ColdCore currently handles the
layout for (in a sometimes buggy way)), but that didn't go anywhere.

All of that aside, why are we still trying to encode information in odd and
non-standard ways today?  Why do we send formatted text to the client and
then lament the inability of the client to perform many of the more
interesting things that a client could do.

What do people want of a good client, apart from the 'standard' features of
triggers and such?  I'll make a start:

 * An internal object model
 * A scripting language
 * Ability to parse a stream of data from the server which
   isn't flat, formatted text and use that to update the
   internal object model.
 * Capable of handling multimedia data.

Questions that arise are:
 * Can it support both room-based MUDs and non-room-based MUDs
   well?
 * What types of operations are typical in a MUD environment
   that should be communicated to the client?
 * What is the extension model?  In an ideal world, the client
   would be extensible in such a way that just downloading a
   new 'art pack' and some code plugins should enable it to
   handle a particular MUD server or game.
 * What else exists out there that might be good to leverage?
   WorldForge? Skotos?

A lot of this would be fairly easy to do with Mozilla as the base, using the
work already done on ChatZilla, the IRC client.  Who else out there is
willing to contribute time and code?

 - Bruce





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