[MUD-Dev] Mozilla as a client (was: A new MUD-standard)

[Bruce]

Hi Kwon,

It is great to see other people interested in Mozilla! :)

Kwon Ekstrom wrote:

> I have been (and still am) seriously considering embedding Mozilla
> NWLayout into a mud client.  I think it'd be interesting if you sent
> data to the client in "packets" which were rendered on the screen.
> The advantage of using NWLayout is because it's a web browser engine
> with full support for HTML 4.0, CSS 1.0, and DOM 1.0 with Netscape
> style plugins available.  With all the tools available for writing web
> pages available, it'd be a powerful interface.

This was what originally got me interested in Mozilla until I actually 
started to use it and saw how many memory leaks and such it had and 
ended up taking a several month detour into working on memory leaks 
instead. :/

Beyond what you mention, there are also things like the upcoming SVG 
support, the existing support for RDF, and (I believe) XML-RPC. XSL 
would be nice as well to provide a stylesheet-based way of converting 
from text with markup (in XML) to a visible and viewable format for the 
user to read.  I've also really wanted to see an entire administrative 
and building interface for a mud that used those tools as it could do a 
far better job at presenting data than was possible via HTML a couple of 
years ago.

I think these are good examples of why it is useful to build upon 
existing standards and to leverage them in your design and 
implementation, rather than taking a Not-Invented-Here approach and 
recreate things from the ground up.

> The trick would be to relay data back and forth and to have a
> scroll-back limit.  I think you'd have to give the core engine the
> ability to run a script on receiving a packet, or throw an event... if
> the event isn't handled, then just append it at the end.  You'd
> probably want to place data inside of an element so that it could be
> handled easily.

(I've got a post coming up sometime this week about protocol 
requirements and a look at the current set of existing protocols which 
may address some of the things that you brought up here.  I just need 24 
more hours in my days. :)  With luck, that will cover the topics that 
are currently being ignored in the current thread.)

In terms of implementing a basic chat client in Mozilla, have you looked 
at Chatzilla which implements enough of the IRC protocol and does 
scrollback and everything?  It opens a socket from within JS and goes 
from there.

andreww at Netscape was also working on a single-player RPG type engine 
using Mozilla, which may have useful XUL for handling graphics and such.

  - Bruce

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